La Chartreuse de Parme (1948) watch online HD

I quote from Time Out Film Guide, 11th ed. "...demonstrates to what degree French cinema de qualité was rather a matter of quantity, demanding a complacent accumulation of production values in lieu of the slightest vision or intelligence." This is boilerplate, trotted out to denigrate all literary adaptations made before Truffaut and Godard arrived on the scene. The film that I saw was made by a solid craftsman well before he became a hack. The sets are often stunning (the prison out of Piranesi), the costumes superb, the actors--well, you couldn't ask for anybody better than Gerard Philipe and Maria Casarès, both 25 at the time, Renée Faure, Louis Salou, Lucien Coedel.

Christian-Jaque had one big problem when he sat down with Pierre Véry to write the script: the novel is very digressive and full of scenes that don't advance the action. It takes 40 pages from the meeting with Giletti to the knife fight resulting in Giletti's death that puts Fabrice in prison. It was necessary to eliminate some minor characters and the opening chapters dealing with Waterloo are gone (major disappointment for Stendhal fans). Most problematical: the story really gets underway when Fabrice enters prison, and that isn't until Chapter 18, more than halfway through the book. If you can be patient and wait until the half way mark in a picture that lasts almost three hours, you will enjoy a classic.

Maria Casarès was too young to play La Sanseverina, a woman in her late thirties, but let's not observe tradition here. The sexual excitement around the Gina-Fabrice-Clelia triangle is only made more potent with Casarès. The happy few can be even happier.

If you are alive then,at the end of the film, in the gothic Italian church, you will cry thinking of love while listening the "Ave María".

"Joy is impossible, but it worths all of our live" (Stendhal)

Beautiful story developed patiently but rewarding, that takes you on a trip to the Renaissance Parma. The sets are stunning. The actors performance are amazingly balanced, avoiding over-dramatization.

What a beautiful and unpredictable ending yet fully justified. And the most haunting scene of the film at the end, inside the Italian church under the divine melodies of ave maria, the two lovers only looking at each other manage to express the deepest and most intense love .... An epic to not be missed.