Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars). 1976. Italy/France/West Germany/Iran. Directed by Valerio Zurlini. Screenplay by Jean-Louis Bertucelli, André G. Brunelin, Zurlini, based on a novel by Dino Buzzati. With Vittorio Gassman, Jacques Perrin, Giuliano Gemma, Philippe Noiret, Fernando Rey, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Max von Sydow, Francisco Rabal, Laurent Terzieff. In Italian; English subtitles. 4K digital restoration courtesy Cinecittà. 140 min.
Featuring an extraordinary, all-star international cast, cinematography that recalls the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico (the great Luciano Tovoli had shot Antonioni’s The Passenger the previous year), and a brooding Ennio Morricone soundtrack that underscores the film’s Beckettian themes of isolation and madness, Valerio Zurlini’s The Desert of the Tartars “may be the grandest and most lavish existentialist parable ever made” (Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice). The film is a fitting coda, as well, to our major exhibition of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, as it was financed by the same short-lived Iranian company that also made Orson Welles’s F for Fake and features as its main protagonist the monumentally forbidding ancient desert fortress of Arg-e-Bam.