'Tis Pity She's a Whore

What Patroni Griffi has done here is simply to lift the doom-laden incest theme out of the centre of Ford's Jacobean tragedy, carefully re-tailoring it into a loweringly measured mood piece exactly matching his own extraordinary first film Il Mare. A setting of brooding, obsessive melancholy; three characters locked in a personal hell of no exit (brother, sister, the importunate husband to whom she is hurriedly married when incest bears fruit); and a carnivorous battle escalating, not as in Il Mare into the despair of solitude, but into a fine bout of Jacobean blood-letting. Directing with breathtaking control over his images (the camera-work is by the remarkable Vittorio Storaro), Patroni Griffi has in effect turned the play into sonorous opera. The voices, given that this is an Italian film 'shot in English', admittedly leave something to be desired, but it hardly matters.