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Not Eliot's wasteland but Michelangelo Antonioni's, its heartbeat is the fiery thumping of a smokestack (cf. Metropolis). Industrial landscapes and sludgy rivers, "waste from all these factories has to go somewhere," more than an intrusion into Nature, a mutated new ecosystem. The fragile human center is the engineer's wife (Monica Vitti), fresh out of the clinic after a traumatic accident and increasingly alarmed by the baleful forms around her. "The gears still don't quite mesh," explains the husband (Carlo Chionetti), whose friend (Richard Harris) has plans for the edge of the world, Patagonia. Engulfing fear, that sinking feeling. "An illness like any other. We all suffer from it." Blue control room, yellow vapors, crimson pipes, gray fruit, a green overcoat drifting through it all. Her son fakes paralysis while a gangling toy robot won't stop bumping into things, artificial peepers in the darkened bedroom lend a glimmer of Tati. One dilapidated shack keeps a mural of zebras, another has planks painted red for a little Matisse chamber, the bourgies crammed inside are too bored for an orgy. (The décor is put to better use when Harris punches the wall and feeds the wood to the fire.) "What do people expect me to do with my eyes?" Pollution of beauty and beauty of pollution, Antonioni's staggering science-fiction opus. Blurriness from long lenses creates Baldessari faces, humming, hissing, electronic beeps comprise the musique concrète. Fellini in Amarcord reworks the gargantuan tanker materializing out of the fog, the pestilence flag goes up and the heroine goes to pieces. Escape is a fairytale, the enchanted isle of pink beaches and fleshy rocks, of unmanned ships and siren songs. "One mystery is all right, but two are too many!" Marnie is concurrent with its own twisting psyches and coloring experiments, and the following year there's Repulsion. Cinematography by Carlo Di Palma. With Xenia Valderi, Rita Renoir, and Aldo Grotti.
--- Fernando F. Croce |