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Cronaca di un amore, one's end and another's false start. The abstracted heroine holds an empty frame over objects and gets a still life or two, such is the art of images, in the background an electric fan mocks the silent air. The Roman translator (Monica Vitti) and her beau (Francisco Rabal) at dawn after a protracted breakup, "non lo so" is her leitmotif. The mushroom cloud outside is just a metallic tower, as much a part of the modern world as the frenzied stock exchange, realm of the lupine young stockbroker (Alain Delon). Zigzagging around the pit and jumping in and out of phone booths, he's forced into stillness during a moment of silence for a dead colleague: "You know, one minute here costs millions." (A thick concrete column splits the screen and half-obscures the budding couple.) The materiality of things and the impermanence of emotions, Michelangelo Antonioni at his most radical and hypersensitive. Romance in the void is a halting experiment, a messy whimsy against sterile surfaces, the flattened lips of a kiss through a glass window. Baudelaire's "bons chiens," one of them does a trick that tickles the lass until she becomes frightened (or entranced) by bare poles clanging in the wind. Kenyan mementos, balloon and rifle, a bit of calm up in the sky. Capitalism's teeming nerve center and its fluctuations, when it's down "leftists" and "socialists" are to blame. (The ruined investor is followed to a sidewalk café, he leaves behind flower doodles on a napkin.) Dalí's Rainy Taxi turns up as a white convertible with a corpse at the bottom of the canal, the owner shrugs, "a little polish and it'll be like new." People meet and drift "but then maybe they shouldn't fall in love at all," not even gorgeous movie stars. The rendezvous not kept is a little apocalypse of its own, Antonioni's magnificent concluding collage locates baleful illumination in a darkened street corner. ("Don't tell me the moon is shining," demands Chekhov.) Cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo. With Lilla Brignone, Rossana Rory, Mirella Ricciardi, and Louis Seigner. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |