The Mystery of Oberwald (1981)
"Il mistero di Oberwald" (original title)

A hunted man breaks into the castle at Oberwald to kill the Queen, but faints before doing so. He is Sebastian, the splitting image of the King who was assassinated on his wedding day. The ... See full summary »

Director:

Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers:

Jean Cocteau (play), Michelangelo Antonioni (adaptation),

Stars:

Monica Vitti, Paolo Bonacelli, Franco Branciaroli

1 win.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Monica Vitti	...	The Queen
Paolo Bonacelli	...	Count of Foehn
Franco Branciaroli	...	Sebastian
Luigi Diberti	...	Willenstein
Elisabetta Pozzi	...	Edith de Berg
Amad Saha Alan	...	Tony

Storyline

A hunted man breaks into the castle at Oberwald to kill the Queen, but faints before doing so. He is Sebastian, the splitting image of the King who was assassinated on his wedding day. The Queen discovers that Sebastian once wrote a subversive poem that she liked, even though it was attacking her. The Queen dares Sebastian to kill her, otherwise she vows to kill him.

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Plot Keywords:

queen | castle | widow | double suicide | experimental film | 

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Taglines:

"If you don't kill me, I'll kill you." [Video Australia]

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Genres:

Drama | Romance

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Details

Country:

Italy West Germany

Language:

Italian German

Release Date:

3 September 1981 (Italy)

Also Known As:

The Mystery of Oberwald

Company Credits

Production Co:

Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), Polytel International Film

Technical Specs

Runtime:

129 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

One of the first major international feature films to be shot on video, a controversial decision at the time of its release.

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Connections

Version of L'aigle à deux têtes (1948)

User Reviews

A minor Antonioni exercise, but with much of interest

The movie has a bit of a lumpy, experimental quality, with Antonioni's customary compositional elegance severely muted and the experiments with the colour scheme variable in their impact. Even when it's striking, such as the bathing of the chief of police in cold grey light, Vitti in warmer colours and the poet somewhere in between, it never seems to move beyond a rather simple colour coding. The extremely dramatic opening music sets a tone of fiery melodrama, and events do develop a modest suspense, which slowly comes to be a distilled version of a standard Antonioni work touching on politics, love, ambiguity of motives and intentions, the unknowable quality of objective truth, and so on. Still, in this form it could hardly carry the impact of some of his greater works. The absence of the world outside focuses attention on the insular, claustrophobic nature of the plotting but basically marks it as a minor exercise.