Name: Col cuore in gola
Director: Tinto Brass
Released: 1967

Before Tinto Brass became the name Italian censors and late-night television made him, he was a thirty-three-year-old formalist with a Moviola and no patience for rules. The 83rd Venice Film Festival opens tonight, ahead of its official opening film, by handing the Lido back to that earlier Brass: a restored 4K print of Col cuore in gola (Deadly Sweet), his 1967 thriller, screens as the pre-opening film at the Sala Darsena on 1 September. The restoration was carried out by Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and paid for by Netflix. The festival is also giving Brass the Pietro Bianchi Prize. The provocateur is now patrimony.

The film itself is the argument for the fuss. Shot in London at the height of the pop era, Col cuore in gola drops Jean-Louis Trintignant into a swinging-Sixties plot of blackmail and murder opposite Ewa Aulin, and treats the whole thing as an excuse for form. Brass directed it and, crucially, edited it himself — the picture is a showreel of split screens, comic-strip panels, jump cuts and superimpositions, with Guido Crepax, the artist behind the Valentina comics, brought on as visual consultant. Adapted from Sergio Donati’s crime novel Il sepolcro di carta, it is a giallo that keeps interrupting itself to show you how it was made.

That is what makes the restoration more than nostalgia. The Brass most viewers know arrived a decade later, with Salon Kitty, the notorious Caligula and a long run of erotic comedies that fixed his reputation as Italy’s chief provocateur-auteur. Col cuore in gola is the road not taken — the experimental, montage-drunk Brass who might have been filed alongside the era’s other formal radicals had he not found a more lucrative lane. Seeing it in 4K, in festival-grade projection, reframes an author most catalogues reduce to a single register.

Its disappearance is part of the story. Col cuore in gola circulated thinly after 1967, cut and retitled for different markets — Deadly Sweet abroad, I Am What I Am in the United States — and slid into the status of a rarity traded among cinephiles rather than a film anyone could readily see. The body that has pulled it back into view, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, is Italy’s national film school and the home of the Cineteca Nazionale; restoration is its remit. That an institution built to teach and preserve cinema is the one reintroducing the young Brass says something about which version of him the culture now wants on record.

There is an irony in who paid for it. Netflix, the company most associated with the disposability of the image — watched once, buried in a menu — is funding the archival rescue of exactly the kind of marginal, difficult, half-forgotten title its own economics tend to bury. It is a familiar trade now: streamers underwrite prestige restoration because prestige is the one thing an algorithm cannot manufacture. Venice, which has spent years negotiating its relationship with the platforms, stages the exchange in plain view on its first night.

The Pietro Bianchi Prize, given by Italy’s film journalists in agreement with the Biennale, formalizes the rehabilitation. It honours a figure Italian cinema long kept at arm’s length, and it does so in his native Veneto, a short boat ride from the city he came from. The award and the screening are one gesture: the institution reclaiming an artist it once found convenient to treat as a scandal.

Col cuore in gola screened out of competition at Venice in 1967; it returns, nearly sixty years on, inside the Venice Classics programme that runs through 12 September. The restored version, drawn from materials held by rights-holder Compass Film, is likely to travel the repertory and boutique-disc circuit from here. Danny Boyle’s Ink opens the competition on 2 September. Brass opens the festival the night before.

Tags: Netflix, Venice Film Festival, 2026, Col cuore in gola, Ewa Aulin, Jean-Louis Trintignant