Vacanza- - Tinto Brass 1971 -s... | The Vacation -la

Redgrave saw La Vacanza as a vehicle for her politics. She wrote several of her own lines, including a monologue where Immacolata compares a lover’s touch to “the hand of a factory owner counting coins.” Brass, to his credit, allowed her the freedom. The resulting tension—Redgrave’s sincere, Brechtian anger versus Brass’s cynical, erotic lens—creates the film’s electric charge.

Brass uses architecture as a weapon. The hotel where the couple stays is a Fascist-era building: cold, symmetrical, inhuman. The couple walks through its corridors like prisoners. The famous “vacation” locales—the beach, the mountains, the piazza—are all framed as traps. In a bravura sequence, Brass films the couple from the bottom of a swimming pool. Their voices are muffled. They wave at each other but cannot hear. It is a perfect metaphor for the film’s theme: communication failed before it began. The Vacation -La Vacanza- - Tinto Brass 1971 -S...

La Vacanza was his thesis: The bourgeoisie does not need to be overthrown from the outside. It will implode from its own sexual and emotional impotence. The “vacation” is a metaphor for the false promise of consumer freedom. You can drive a fast car and wear expensive sunglasses, but if your soul is dead, you are already a ghost. Redgrave saw La Vacanza as a vehicle for her politics

Today, The Vacation (as it is known in English markets) is a cult object. It is rarely screened, but when it is, it provokes fierce debate. Is it a forgotten masterpiece of existential dread? Or is it pretentious nonsense saved only by its rock-star curiosity? Brass uses architecture as a weapon

This is not a lighthearted holiday romp. It is a claustrophobic, cynical, and deeply unsettling road movie through the Italian bourgeoisie. It is also famous—or infamous—for one of the most bizarre casting choices of the 20th century: the lead role played by , opposite a script co-written by Brass and none other than Franco Arcalli (the legendary editor of Pier Paolo Pasolini). But the true shock is the co-star: Franco Nero ? No. The male lead is Jimmy Page .

But the vacation unravels immediately.

The film failed spectacularly at the box office. Critics called it “pretentious” and “moribund.” But decades later, film scholars have reclaimed it as a missing link between Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) and Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989). Now, we address the elephant in the room: Jimmy Page as an actor.