The Desert of the Tartars
The final film by cult Italian director Valerio Zurlini is a hauntingly beautiful adaptation of Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel of the same name, published in English as THE TARTAR STEPPE. Zurlini’s favorite leading man Jacques Perrin plays a young lieutenant posted to a remote fortress on the far fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life gradually consumed by hollow military ritual as he awaits attack by an invisible enemy. Elegantly crafted, with visual allusions to the painter Giorgio de Chirico and a mournful Ennio Morricone score, this sumptuous existential parable costars Max von Sydow and Vittorio Gassman.
Jacques Perrin, Vittorio Gassman, Giuliano Gemma
- Notes From James GrayI came late to THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS, Valerio Zurlini’s final film. Perhaps this is as it should be, for TARTARS is, above all, a stark and anguished and mournful picture, the kind that benefits greatly from a heightened awareness of one’s own mortality. And though the film stands out as a true physical marvel (shot on location in an ancient castle in Iran) it is not the movie’s epic visual splendor which impacts us most. The soldiers within the fort may start out seeking grandeur, but in the end these lonely souls roam the great castle like ghosts, adrift, unable to conquer time’s punishing indifference. The cast is the stuff of legend: Trintignant, Noiret, Von Sydow, Rey, Gassman, Rabal, Perrin; and the score is by the legendary Ennio Morricone.
