Grazie Zia

Digitmovies, with collaboration of Gruppo Sugar, presents on CD the complete version of the OST by Ennio Morricone, for the dramatic movie “Grazie zia” (aka ” Merci ma tante”) directed in 1968 by Salvatore Samperi (his debut as a director) and starring Lisa Gastoni, Lou Castel, Gabriele Ferzetti, Nicoletta Rizzi, Massimo Sarchielli. Alvise (Castel), the neurotic son of a wealthy family of industrialists, pretends to be paralyzed and is in the care of his young and wealthy aunt Lea (Gastoni), a doctor by profession, in the hope that the young guy can achieve some improvement. In the isolated country house a relationship with morbid implications establishes between the two, led by the lucid madness of the patient. Gradually, Lea sinks into a dark dimension of new sensations stimulated by the provocations of the boy, a twisted feeling of attraction and addiction which isolates her from the outside world, to the detriment of her long relationship with the left-wing journalist Stefano (Ferzetti).The grandson irresistibly involves the aunt in a crescendo of sadomasochistic games, which culminate, just as it was his intention, not in sex, but in death: When he asks her to kill him, she accepts without hesitation to inject a lethal substance into his veins. The whole drama of the story is set against an interesting OST by Ennio Morricone which is based on the recurrent use of the boy’s choir of Renata Cortiglioni who sing a funny and surreal rhyme with Beat arrangements. The composer has created a magical and suspenseful atmosphere with a few instruments which perfectly represents the dimension of love and death in which the two protagonists are isolated. “Filastrocca vietnamita” sung by Sergio Endrigo fully reflects the revolutionary tones of 1968. In those days C.A.M. issued a 45 rpm single (AMP 40), whereas in France a 45 rpm EP was released on the AZ label (EP 1259) with five selections. Four tracks appeared on the CD of the C.A.M. soundtrack encyclopedia series (CAM CSE 051) (where the song “Guerra e pace, pollo e brace” featured on the single was strangely doubled). For our CD and with the full approval of the author, we could use the mono master tapes of the original session and include every recorded note (40:19) which includes both the material issued on the Italian and the French singles, but with the exclusion of one source music piece: a dance floor shake based on “Auschwitz” by Francesco Guccini from the year 1967 and which was not included in the master tapes.