review for Senso on AllMovie

Senso is a stunning film, featuring Luchino Visconti at his most operatic. With Alida Valli and Farley Granger thrown in for marquee value, the film chronicles the last days of the Austrian-Italian conflict, in the spring of 1866. A performance of Il Trovatore serves as the backdrop for a stormy romance between Livia Serpieri, trapped in a loveless marriage, and a young Austrian office-worker, Franz Mahler (Granger). Their affair is bound to end tragically, and it does, but not before Visconti and his scenarists (including additional dialogue from Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles) have created a delirious world of color, music, deception, and betrayal in which revenge is always the strongest motivation for all human affairs. Senso simply demands to be seen on a cinema screen; reduced to the dimensions of even the most grandiose home theater system, the film loses much of its visual impact. Yet Visconti's vision is so over the top, so deliciously abandoned, that the trip is well worth taking, even on DVD. One of the most unrestrained of Visconti's many films, Senso is a lavish spectacle of the highest order.