A 10 star Masterpiece DISGRACEFULLY underrated out of pure envy
Because of its horrendous reputation as supposedly the film that destroyed Orson-Welles' protege Peter Bogdanovich's career momentum, it took me 3 years after I first bought the DVD of Daisy Miller to finally sit down and watch the film. Owning hundreds of DVDs from all region codes and being mostly disappointed in PB's post-Dorothy-Stratten-affair films, I would always find an excuse to skip this one.
Well, I'm here to tell you that this is a fantastic film, a cinematic masterpiece easily on the same level of "Time Regained" by Raul Ruiz or "The Magnificent Ambersons" by Orson Welles, much better than "Age of Innocence" by Martin Scorsese and 10 times better than Bertolucci's visually beautiful but ridiculously two-dimensional and politically biased "1900." Bogdanovich SCHOOLS both Bertolucci and Scorsese in this film.
In fact, its light touch makes the Kazanesque heavy-handedness of Scorsese's work seem like child's play. Bogdanovich exceeded not just my low expectations by a mile but all my HIGHEST expectations also. This just happens to be the single BEST film that could have ever been made out of this kind of subject matter I have ever seen.
The film's tone: a perfect mix of light-comedy, drama and non-biased social commentary resulting in maybe the most romantic film ever made, but ONLY if you pay attention. This is a Wellesian, depth-conceived mise-en-scene where every single detail in every single shot has been weighed and thought about, matters and tells a story. These little visually told stories that arise out of the film's depth then add to the richness and final impact of the whole tapestry.
Cinematography: Perfection itself. Wellesian techniques galore. Deep focus and soft focus merged in perfect synergy creating a feeling that you're watching beautiful moving paintings. Overlapping dialogue but not too much like Altman. Natural light used as much as possible, etc. I can go on and on.
Production design: Absolutely exquisite; You feel transported entirely to a different era in every single shot.
Location shots: magnificent. Filmed in Italy and Switzerland but without a hint of "the 1970s." All location shots look over a century old, aged like vintage wine, unlike most "period" films which look and sound like they were shot on a soundstage or dated exactly in the year they were made.
Last but not least: Absolutely superb direction of actors. Not a single performance is overdone, least of all the one that is criticized the most. Cybil Shepherd should have been nominated for an Oscar for her incredibly charming performance, not butchered with the viciousness of vultures for "woodenness," when the part itself called for plenty of deliberately calibrated "naivete" and pretension tempered by humor. She is, after all, supposed to be a young rich girl from America in Europe, where she knows she'll never be accepted as herself ahead of time, therefore she flouts their conventions at the same time that she's incapable of meeting them. Same as the real Cybil Shepherd in Hollywood. She knows she'll never be accepted not because she can't act but because she's not a trained professional who fits the boxes and molds the "film snobs" require (those who can't make decent films themselves but think they know everything about what it takes to be a "real artist," lol).
The hilarious part is that this movie even has the last laugh on its own harshest critics. Shepherd's critics remind me of the snobs in the movie like Barry Brown's aunt or the character played by Eileen Brennan who banned her from "their drawing rooms" because she didn't have the "right manners," was "too pretty and got all the guys to chase her" (all the endless comments about how she's a 'model' not an actress, blah, blah, blah) and are just as easily dismissed as the Barry Brown character, who slowly falls in love with her precisely for her uniqueness and exuberance, dismisses the aunt and Brennan.