Visconti's retelling of the Electra story starts with Sandra/Electra (Claudia Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in Italy - and reviving an intimate involvement with her brother (Jean Sorel) which troubles her naive husband (Michael Craig (actor)) - on the eve of an official ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration camp. As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando Nannuzzi's camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced their father.
Sandra, fille d’un savant juif mort à Auschwitz, retourne à Volterra, sa ville natale, en compagnie de son mari américain. Elle y retrouve sa mère, femme jadis très belle et désormais un peu folle, son frère qui éprouve pour elle une affection presque morbide, et l’administrateur des biens, ex-amant de sa mère ayant joué un rôle un peu trouble dans la déportation de son père…
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