Two characters who get what they deserve in Visconti's period-piece melodrama

There are some really fine scenes in Luchino Visconti’s melodramatic period piece, Senso (1954), and we can see in this early film much evidence of Visconti’s over-the-top direcrtorial style and his interest in filling the screen with lush interiors abundantly decorated and w/ a pulsating “classical” score that at times dominates the action (I think most of the score is from a Bruckner symphony – one of my least-favorite composers, though after seeing this film I thought maybe cinema scores would or should have been his metier). In brief, the film – based on a 1880s novel by Boito and set mostly in Venice in the 1860s at a time when Venice was under Austrian occupation and Garibaldi was leading troops in Italy to kick out the occupying army and unite the country – is about a young, married Countess (Livia) who is seduced by a falls in love w/ a young Austrian officer (Franz), who weirdly is played by an American actor (all the dialog was later synched in, in Italian and German). Livia, who starts out as an Italian patriot in league w/ the resistance, ultimately betrays the resistance in order to reunite w/ Franz – but when she does so she – at last – recognizes that he has duped her and that he’s a horrible and corrupt man: two terrible people who pretty much, in the end, get what they deserved. Clearly, Visconti would have been thinking, in making this film, about the German occupation of France and about the fate of the collaborators, particularly women who fell in love w/ German officers and soldiers (and perhaps harboring some shame about the role of Italy in the War). Among the great scenes: the opera scene (Il Trovatore) at the opening that erupts into a demonstration, the surprise when Olivia tells her husband she’s been having an affair, the battle scenes that I believe give us among the most vivid and probably realistic sense of military battles in the late 19^th century, and Franz’s drunken rampage at the end, when Livia stupidly shows up at his doorstep, unannounced. If only we cared at least a little about the lead characters and their relationship – but we know, and see, much more than they do and we know where this story is headed.