Beatrice Cenci

Synopsis: The city is aghast with the news of the impending execution of young Beatrice Cenci, her mother and her elder brother for the crime of parricide. The murdered man, Count Francesco Cenci, was a cruel, avaricious man, whose money helped protect him from the censure of the all-powerful Church. Gradually, under torture, the Cenci and their co-conspirators confess to the crime, and reveal the motive: Count Cenci's abuse and torture of his family had culminated in the rape of his own daughter, following a blasphemous celebration of the death of two of his sons. Supplications to the Pope for mercy fall on deaf ears, however; the jurists debate the ethics of the matter with their prostitutes, and Beatrice and her family go to the scaffold.


"It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, from his Introduction to The Cenci

Notes: The apparently true story of Beatrice Cenci has inspired many artists, including stage works by Shelley, Antonin Artuad and Berthold Goldschmidt, and a film by Riccardo Freda. Lucio Fulci's Beatrice Cenci, possibly his best film, follows Artaud's conception more closely than Shelley's. The violence of the subject matter is conveyed not with explicit gore, as in Fulci's later films, but mostly through editing and through the deliberately fragmented time-line. For instance, we go directly from Count Cenci's imprisonment of Beatrice in the dungeons to Cenci's funeral, and then to implications that his demise was not an accident; we are catapulted from a cruel scene of torture to an idyllic love scene (representing the first part of the tortured man's confession); and, because it comes as a flash-back within a flash-back, the reason for the crime isn't made explicit until the end of the movie.

       Fulci has no sympathy with Shelley's high-toned moralizing. Shelley's Beatrice is a woman
"whose character develops from that of a pure-hearted sufferer bravely seeking to redeem her monstrous father by means of peace and love to that of a self-assured murderess who throws the world's logic back into its face and calmly awaits the execution which can be given the appearance of justice only by a moral sleight of hand."
-- Roland A. Duerksen, from his Introduction to Shelley's Beatrice Cenci
(New York: Library of Liberal Arts/Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970)


        Fulci's Beatrice, on the other hand, is less of a stage character and more of a human being. This is unusual enough, in that Fulci's female characters are typically his least interesting or sympathetic; but the real oddity is that Fulci makes her more sympathetic by keeping her character underdeveloped. To tell the truth, Fulci was very bad at creating believeable heroines... he seems to have had as little idea of how women really think and act as any other Italian exploitation director, and possibly less. Rather than go into detail about Beatrice, Fulci keeps her enigmatic, and allows the events and the other characters to tell us more about her than she herself reveals -- and this is what allows Fulci to transcend his limited understnding of female psychology.


        Fulci's Beatrice is certainly an innocent victim of her abusive father, but unlike her literary counterpart she is perfectly capable of using the survival skills she'd have to learn in real life: she lies, she demurs, she seduces when necessary. To modern sensibilities, this does not make her less noble; now that the psychology of the dysfunctional family is known to practically everybody, we can't think of Beatrice's story in purely ethical terms. This Beatrice is more recognizable to us as a tragic figure because we can believe in her. By the same token, Fulci's Count Cenci isn't the eloquent, Sadean monster of Shelley's play; he is a querulous, greedy old man with a cruel streak. He doesn't swagger with stage villainy - he seems always to be nervous, on guard against retribution for any of a hundred crimes.

        Also, Fulci does not share Shelley's contempt of an acquiescent society to the despotic authority of either the Count or the Church -- Fulci's common people are profoundly moved by the plight of Beatrice, and the indifference of the Pope and the court causes public disturbance and unrest. Of course, their unrest is nothing compared to the unrest experienced by the movie's original European audiences, who were shocked by the film's attack on the hypocrisy of the Church.

        The film is brutal, but by contrast to Fulci's later zombie spectaculars, its overwhelming effect is achieved by understatement. There's plenty of overt violence: Count Cenci sets loose his dogs on a helpless victim; the bandit Il Catalano is hunted down and stabbed to death by soldiers; the servant Olimpio is tortured repeatedly, finally having his limbs lopped off; and even lovely Beatrice is stretched on the rack, with the dreaded Crown of Thorns tightened around her brow; but instead of the leering, ironic horror movie tone we expect, Fulci gives us restraint, impassivity, stony realism.