The Vacation -la Vacanza- - Tinto Brass 1971 -s... Jun 2026

This public link is valid for 7 days and shares a thread, including any personal information you added. This link or copies made by others cannot be deleted. If you share with third parties, their policies apply. Can’t copy the link right now. Try again later. Vacation (1971) - IMDb

The narrative follows , a vulnerable young peasant woman who has been unjustly committed to a psychiatric asylum. Her "crime" was not mental illness, but rather becoming an inconvenience: she was the mistress of a local Count who had her institutionalized so he could return to his wife without scandal.

: Her freedom is cut short when she crosses paths with the elite gentry. She faces humiliation from fascistic upper-class landowners at a hunting lodge and is eventually exploited as a factory worker.

The premise is deceptively simple. A married couple, the intellectual and cynical Osiride (Franco Nero) and the restless, sensual Gigliola (Vanessa Redgrave’s younger sister, the magnetic and tragically underused Florinda Bolkan), drive from Rome to a remote villa in the countryside for a weekend getaway. They are joined by a younger man, the naive and impulsive Sandro (Franco Nero in a dual role—yes, Nero plays both the husband and the lover). The Vacation -La Vacanza- - Tinto Brass 1971 -S...

La vacanza was produced by Lion International Film and was, for all intents and purposes, a family affair. It was co-produced by Brass and Franco Nero, and the soundtrack music was composed by Fiorenzo Carpi, with a young Gigi Proietti providing vocals for the closing track.

The setup suggests a ménage à trois drama, perhaps in the vein of Antonioni’s L’Avventura . But Brass immediately subverts expectations. There is no erotic liberation. Instead, La Vacanza depicts a slow, systematic psychological unravelling fueled by boredom, political disillusionment, and a venomous class resentment.

Director Tinto Brass, Vanessa Redgrave, and Franco Nero had just wrapped their previous collaboration, Dropout (1970). Seeking to expand their exploration of societal outcasts, they immediately pushed forward with La Vacanza . This public link is valid for 7 days

The film’s title refers to the clinical term within the asylum’s jargon for a “trial leave” or “experimental license”—a brief period during which patients are temporarily released from confinement to test whether they can function normally in society. Immacolata is granted one such vacation, returning to her family with the hope of reintegrating into everyday life. But her homecoming is anything but welcoming. Rather than embracing their returning daughter, her impoverished family—who appear physically and emotionally grotesque in Brass’s depiction, some played by little people to emphasize their alienation from the protagonist—see her merely as another mouth to feed. They quickly sell her to a creditor named Olindo, effectively treating her like livestock, an act summed up in the Italian synopses by the brutal term “cavalla” (mare).

The film’s title thus carries a powerful irony. Immacolata’s “vacation” is a cruel joke—a brief taste of freedom that is destined to be snatched away. The happiness she finds with Osiride and the gypsies is authentic but fleeting, a small pocket of resistance within a world that is fundamentally hostile to her. When she is ultimately returned to the clinic, the implication is clear: true freedom, for those who exist outside the bounds of society, is impossible.

For cinephiles, The Vacation is a fascinating artifact. It showcases Tinto Brass before he fully embraced the "Pop-Erotica" aesthetic. It retains the political bite of his earlier works like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (though he was uncredited on that project) and Nerosubianco . The film is often cited as a "lost classic" of Italian cinema, valuable for its atmospheric direction and its stark, unromanticized view of human desire. Can’t copy the link right now

: While it was highly acclaimed by critics in Venice, it faced censorship battles and was largely kept out of mainstream American theaters for decades. Tinto Brass - Vacation

(1971), directed by Tinto Brass , remains one of the most enigmatic and politically charged works of early 1970s Italian cinema. Starring Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero , the film is far removed from the stylized erotica that Brass would later become famous for, instead serving as a gritty, satirical critique of societal norms and institutional power. Plot Summary: A Leave of Absence from Sanity

In 1971, Led Zeppelin was becoming the biggest rock band on the planet. Page was known for his occult obsessions, his double-necked guitar, and his fierce reluctance to give interviews. Why did he agree to star in an obscure Italian art film?