A LOVE AFFAIR

Obsession incubus fate mystery vice secrecy fashion evil perdition love""-- of this and more is Laide, a full time prostitute and part time ballerina, to Antonio Dorigo who annotates his sexual infatuation here with a Moravian realismo. Signor Buzzati is well known in his country as a novelist and for his cinema activities, and circumscribed (or proscribed?) as his theme may be, he brings to it all considerable acuity and intensity. Antonio, a successful architect, usually rather uncomfortable with women, has for years (he is fiftyish) frequented prostitutes. aide, a quite young daughter of joy, for the first time arouses something more than the devil in the flesh-- an enchantment which for all its fully acknowledged fatuity, consumes and vitiates him. He is humiliated but helpless all through the disappearances and deceptions to follow; he is also querulous, suspicious, wretched. But the release he finally achieves is tinged with the survival sadness that he has loved away from life, toward death... What is to be procured here? excitation certainly, but also a respect for the expertise with which this dossier of that sexual deadlock, a little more than lust, a little less than love, is handled.