Notte di tempesta
When a count who lives as a widower with his adult daughter and son takes in a housekeeper and her joyously unrestrained youthful daughter (aptly named “Vivian”), he struggles with the simmering conflict between his urge for his imagined pleasures of forbidden fruit and his duty to maintain an appearance proper to his class - while working around the girl's crush on his son - which leaves him looking both pathetic and ludicrous. Part One is wonderfully carried by the tension between the lively naturalistic character of the girl and the subdued degeneration of the count (much like Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962)), that climaxes in the title's tempesta and the reticent daughter's brief, but powerful, switch to diva mode. Too bad Part Two devolves into a routine melodrama that goes on too long, saying nothing - until the daughter again switches to diva mode, but only for an instant.