Taglines: Wherever they meet they make it a place for lovers.
A Place for Lovers movie storyline. Julia (Faye Dunaway), a divorced American fashion designer, is dying of a tragic, incurable disease. With only ten days to live, she spends her time vacationing in an Italian villa and watching television. She spots a TV interview with an Italian engineer Valerio (Marcello Mastroianni), who designs plastic air bags to protect passengers in automobile collisions. She recognizes his face as having met him before at the airport and calls him up to invite him over to her villa where they decide to spend the next several days together, making love.
Julia’s friend Maggie reappears and reveals that Julia is actually an escapee from the hospital where she was being treated for her disease. Maggie urges Julia to return to the hospital where she can die a painless death. Julia ignores her and returns to the villa and the arms of her lover. Maggie then telephones Valerio and tells him about Julia’s condition. Valerio is willing to stay for the duration but Julia is so upset by the fact that her lover knows her secret that she runs to a nearby mountaintop with the intention of committing suicide.
A Place for Lovers (Italian: Amanti, French: Le Temps des amants) is a 1968 French-Italian romantic drama film directed by Vittorio De Sica, written by Brunello Rondi, Julian Zimet, Peter Baldwin, Ennio De Concini, Tonino Guerra, and Cesare Zavattini. The film is based on the play Gli Amanti by Brunello Rondi and Renaldo Cabieri and was distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The film stars Faye Dunaway as a terminally ill American fashion designer in Venice, Italy who has a whirlwind affair with a race car driver (played by Marcello Mastroianni). Ella Fitzgerald provides two songs, the title song and Lonely Is (“What lonely is, is me!”). Both songs can be heard on the Verve release Jukebox Ella: The Complete Verve Singles, Vol. 1.
Film Review for A Place for Lovers
“A Place for Lovers” is the most godawful piece of pseudo-romantic slop I’ve ever seen. I did see it. Yes. I sat there in the dark, stunned by disbelief. Could Vittorio de Sica possibly have directed it? De Sica, who made “The Bicycle Thief”? Even a director who had made no movies would have a hard time making one as bad as this.
It is about a beautiful woman (Faye Dunaway) who has an incurable disease and takes up with an engineer (Marcello Mastroianni) who designs big plastic bags of water that are supposed to bring an end to race-track accidents. They go up to a ski lodge and ponder at each other. Ponder, ponder, ponder. When Faye gets all pondered out, she takes the Jeep and drives into town to enigmatically threaten suicide. But she never kills herself, alas.
Instead, she lingers on during some of the most incredibly static scenes ever put on film. There’s a by-play involving a stray dog that she rescues from the dogcatcher and then (apparently) abandons. Either she abandons the dog or the script does. The screenplay was written by no less than five writers, who were possibly locked into separate rooms and forbidden to communicate.
One goes to this movie in the same spirit one visits an ancient town buried by lava centuries ago: To try to determine by examining the ruins what made the gods punish man so.
A Place for Lovers (1968)
Directed by: Vittorio De Sica
Starring: Faye Dunaway, Marcello Mastroianni, Caroline Mortimer, Enrico Simonetti, Karin Eugh, Esmeralda Ruspoli, Yvonne Gilbert, Mirella Pamphili, David Archell, Martha Buckman
Screenplay by: Brunello Rondi, Julian Zimet, Peter Baldwin, Ennio De Concini, Tonino Guerra, Cesare Zavattini
Production Design by: Jone Tuzi
Cinematography by: Pasqualino De Santis
Film Editing by: Adriana Novelli
Costume Design by: Enrico Sabbatini
Art Direction by: Piero Poletto
Music by: Manuel De Sica
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release Date: December 19, 1968 (Italy), September 17, 1969 (France)
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