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"Society has the teenagers it deserves" (J.B. Priestley). The objective is sharply journalistic, the "burnt-out generation" and its obsession with "violence as personal triumph," Michelangelo Antonioni chronicles the war's fallout in three different countries. The French situation is sketched as a languid tram ride from cramped city to Renoir's campagne (a whiskered gamekeeper bicycles by), the coquette (Etchika Choureau) ping-ponging between bourgeois braggart (Jean-Pierre Mocky) and envious delinquent (Henri Poirier). Contempt for the past ("To hell with Racine!"), pocketfuls of counterfeit money, a pistol shot punctuating a picnic like an exclamation point. Long takes give way to nocturnal flurries in Italy, where a college student (Franco Interlenghi) moonlights as a smuggler in a dockside melee modeled on Kazan's Panic in the Streets. A Roman meander charts the wounded clod's malaise while permitting a panorama of an ancient city with half-built skyscrapers in the distance. The ultimate lament falls to the boy's father, the horror of confronting a son and "suddenly finding yourself face to face with a stranger." The closing segment in London makes explicit Antonioni's kinship to Hitchcock, adds a touch of Ealing, and locates a corpse in the park for the benefit of Blowup. Monstrous adolescence here is a cheery twit (Peter Reynolds) who looks like Richard Attenborough and acts like Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train, a failed writer whose work is finally published as a tabloid article. The squashed, deformed dreams of a demented little poet who keeps admiring his own murderous hands, but a confession these days is just a story to be sold. Losey (The Big Night) and Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) take care of the American episode. With Anna Maria Ferrero, Eduardo Ciannelli, Patrick Barr, Fay Compton, and David Farrar. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |