Benvenuta

Delvaux's best film to date. Taken from a novel by Suzanne Lilar, it deals with a scriptwriter's visit to a famous novelist living in Ghent. The scriptwriter, François, wants to adapt for the screen a sensational novel written by Jeanne 20 years earlier. She receives him coldly, but as the scriptwriter's mission becomes clearer her defences begin to fall. Benvenuta is a film about passion. A passion which smoulders slowly in the case of the scriptwriter and the novelist. For the two heroes of the novel, Benvenuta and Livio, this passion erupts like a volcano, only to petrify in the ashes of memory. Delvaux finds for this passion a perfect setting: Naples, Etna and the ruins of Pompeii. (Perreault, La Presse - Montréal)