The Venice Film Festival will pay tribute to nonagenarian Italian director Tinto Brass at its upcoming edition with a pre-opening screening of his London-shot 1967 pop thriller Deadly Sweet starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin.
A restored digital 4K version film will screen as part of the Venice Classics program. The restoration has been carried out by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome with the support of Netflix, using materials provided by rightsholder Compass Film.
Presented Out of Competition at the 1967 edition of Venice, Deadly Sweet takes it cue from a brief encounter between a disenchanted man and a girl with no illusions in the wake of the murder of a nightclub owner in London.
Produced by Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri, it is freely inspired by Sergio Donati’s the novel ‘Il Sepolcro di Carta’, with a screenplay by Brass, Francesco Longo and Pierre Lévy-Corti.
Cinematography is by Silvano Ippoliti, production design by Carmelo Patrono and music by Armando Trovajoli.
Deadly Sweet is among a group of films shot by Brass in the UK capital during his London phase, alongside Attraction (1969) and Dropout (1970).
All three films were filled with references to pop-art and comic art and involved graphic cult cartoonist Guido Crepax as a consultant, with Brass asking him to draw a series of illustrations for the action sequences, which he used as a storyboard.
“The character I present in the film is a man who falls in love with a girl even when he meets her in front of a corpse. He foregoes any attitude of caution, of expediency and dives headlong into this adventure that totally compromises him. The film is also the story of a disillusionment, given that the character imagines the woman for something she is not,” Brass said of the film at the time of its release.
“The pace of the film is adventurous pace, like that of a thriller, set against the backdrop of London which is absolutely ideal to convey a ‘comic-strip’ reality, which stands in contrast however to the real parts, those that involve the protagonist,” he added.
Born in Milan in 1933 to a Venetian family, Brass moved to Paris in 1957, after graduating in Law, where he collaborated in the activities of the Cinémathèque française directed by Henri Langlois, becoming part of the milieu of the emerging Nouvelle Vague and serving as assistant to Joris Ivens and Roberto Rossellini.
He made his directorial debut in Venice in 1963 with his Venice-set tale In Capo Al Mondo (later retitled Chi Lavora è Perduto) about a young unemployed man with anti-social tendencies, which came under fire from the censors in the first of a series of battles fought by Brass over his career due to his personal nonconformist libertarian vision.
The director’s 1971 drama Vacation, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero and Leopoldo Trieste, also played at the festival.
In the late 1970s, Brass entered a new phase and gained fresh notoriety with cult historical-erotic films Salon Kitty (1976) and Caligula (1979) as well as The Key (1983), a free adaptation of a novel by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs from 2 to 12 September 2026.
English (US) ·