(Indian Summer, The Professor)   
Directed by Valerio Zurlini
132 minutes
In French with English subtitles

Italian director Valerio Zurlini (Girl with a suitcase, Violent Summer) had a deep sensitivity, a painter's eye for visuals, a keen sense of ambience, and took on unusual themes. As we know, the film industry is based on finance, and distribution is anything but fluid, open and free. Once a film becomes a hit, then they milk it for everything they can, showing and promoting it over and over... while other films are pushed aside and forgotten. This is one of the later.  

This flick does have a story, which is pretty simple. It stars Alain Delon as a professor of literature who arrives in the seaside town of Rimini to to replace another teacher for the season. It's winter, and the misty streets are gloomy. It's clear he is running away from something, which turns out to be a relationship that's gone wrong. He seems to be trapped and desperate. It's made in the early 70s in Europe, so of course on the sidelines we see students demonstrating, but our lead character isn't part of it—he's disillusioned, doesn't believe in politics or god. But something knocks him out of his disenchantment when he engages with a young student named Vanina. 

But that synopsis is actually missing the entire point. The essence of this flick is mood. The autumn colors, the existential vibe, the lonely streets of the harbor. This is the kind of flick where the atmosphere takes over and knocks you out, the kind they only made in Europe in the last century. It's this aspect that makes the film breathtaking, that carries you away to an almost mythical place... somewhere far away from today's smartphones and technology-saturated society. What about something like poetry, for change? From my point of view, poetry has been almost totally deleted from modern cinema, and culture at large. That's what happens when business takes over culture. The translation of this film's title should be something like "The very first night of peace".

This film is set in a tourist resort during the cold and rainy off-season for a reason... a city transformed into a kind of harbor of the damned, a place with a haunting sense of desolation.... but also a melancholic tranquility. A feeling that you are at the end of the world, the kind of situation that forces you to deal with your destiny. A film with a dark romanticism, a kind of bluesy eroticism, a deep existential edge, and a soft jazz music score by Mario Nascimbene. And oh, it's also got Alain Delon's worn-out, dull blue-grey eyes, that only add to the haunting vibe.