Black Angel

Black Angel (Senso '45, 2002) is an Italian wartime drama — watch online on iFILM. Directed by Tinto Brass, it stars Anna Galiena as Livia Mazzoni, the wife of a high-ranking Fascist official who travels to Venice in March 1945 to find her lover: Helmut Schultz, an SS lieutenant played by Gabriel Garko.

The regime is days from collapse. Livia knows this and goes anyway. Brass made the film as a deliberate counterpoint to Luchino Visconti's 1954 classic Senso — same character, same war, a very different register. Where Visconti's gaze stays cool and operatic, Brass puts the body at the center: Livia's desire is not symbolic, it is the whole point.

The film is uncomfortable in exactly the way Brass intends. He is not interested in Fascist Italy as backdrop so much as what catastrophe exposes in the people living through it. Stream Black Angel (2002) on iFILM.