The Good Soldier (Italian: Il buon soldato, French: Le Bon Soldat) is a 1982 Italian-French romantic drama film co-written and directed by Franco Brusati. It premiered at the 39th edition of the Venice Film Festival.
Contents
Cast
Mariangela Melato as Marta
Gérard Darier as Tommaso
Giampaolo De Angelis as Tommasino
Bruno Zanin as Marco
Carla Bizzarri as Aunt Adele
Toni Barpi as Uncle Pietro
Jean-François Balmer as the Lawyer
Gérard Lartigau as Luca
Siria Betti as Marta's Mother
Carlo Monni as Giovanotto Torretta
Clara Colosimo as Friend
Diana Dei as Friend
Production
Brusati drew inspiration for the script from a true story that occurred in Livorno.
Release
The film had its world premiere at the 39th Venice International Film Festival, in the main competition section. Following its mixed reception, Brusati assembled a new, shorter cut of the film, which was released in Italian cinemas in February 1983.
Reception
Corriere della Sera's film critic Giovanni Grazzini noted that while the Venice cut was marred by "the continuous oscillation between realism and surrealism [...] where images and voices were often way over-the-top", the new theatrical version "by cutting out some of the unpleasantness and giving the whole more compactness, [...] remedies to a good extent the failures of the screenplay".
Paolo Mereghetti noted that even with the new cut the film remains "indefensible", characterized by "subtle conformism", "over-the-top grotesqueness", and a "discordant poetic tone".