Un tentativo sentimentale

A man and a woman meet in an airport and they immediately decide to become lovers. They regularly meet in a house on the beach: they don’t know anything about each other, not even their names, but it is clear that when one of them will miss a date, everything is going to be over. Dino is a rich man with the illusion of escaping the aridity of his ambitions, Carla tries to live an adventure that can make her feel different emotions. She decides to leave her husband, but that very day Dino misses the date. They accidentally meet again and they start again their relationship. But during what will become their last date, Dino’s wife arrives and offers her husband to his lover, in a disdainful way. Once again Dino is unable to choose. Carla leaves him for good.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Pasquale Festa Campanile
I really wanted to be a director, to express myself through the cinema and I was tired, after almost fifty screenplays, to deal with table, typewriter and paper. There are many differences and all other kinds of problems, because when you are a screenwriter you think it that way, but when you are a director you have to face a different reality, made of producers, actors and technicians. There are also huge differences between being a writer and a screenwriter. Of course my regret was making cinema instead of literature for too many years. The success gained by La nonna Sabella, my first novel, confused me, because it dragged me into the world of cinema and then I made a huge number of screenplays, sometimes with satisfaction and I also won three Nastro d’Argento, but sacrificing the literary world, which was very dear to me. I haven’t written any novel for many years and my second book was published almost eighteen years later. (...)
With Franciosa we met at University, where he was assistant in Roman Law. He tested me in a couple of exams. Then we met at the “Fiera Letteraria” and from that day we made many screenplays together and also the first two movies as directors. Then we “broke up”, because couples resist until they write scripts together, but being a director is too personal and two directors can’t coexist. Anyway, it was a friendly breakup, we never had troubles. The most important thing is to talk about everything for a long time, in general and in detail. Then sometimes you can split the scenes, other times you can write them together, it depends from the film, from the occasion, there are no rules.

Campanile and Franciosa
We chose this story for our first directing attempt because we wanted to tell the most modern event possible. Nothing seems to summarise our society like this complete lack of feelings, this ability of making anything without the smallest use of feelings. (...)
Italian actors are too expensive. You can have a foreign actor with the same skills and the same success for half the price. Actually we always claimed that the crisis of Italian cinema is a crisis made of high prices and the fault is mostly of the actors and their excessive demands. So as a consequence we had to choose foreign actors. They also had perfect faces for the characters. (...)
It is almost easier to work actively in cinema than doing it on paper, as we had made with our screenplays for many years. If you learn a few technical rules, everything is going to be all right.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Director: Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa.
Soggetto e sceneggiatura: Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Elio Bartolini, Luigi Magni.
Director of photography: Ennio Guarnieri.
Art director: Lucia Mirisola.
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni.
Music: Piero Piccioni.
Cast and characters: Françoise Prevost (Carla), Jean-Mare Bory (Dino), Leticia Roman (Luciana), Gabriele Ferzetti (Giulio), Barbara Steele (Silvia), Giulio Bosetti (Alberto), Maria Pia Luzi (Irene), Marino Masé (Piero), Antonio Segurini (Brunello).
Production company: Franca Film- Cinematografica Federiz-France Cinéma Prod.
Italian distribution: Cineriz.