Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian in Identification of a Woman

Cast: Tomas Milian, Daniel Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel, Veronica Lazar, Enrica Antonioni, Sandra Monteleoni, Marcel Bozzufi, Giampaolo Saccarola, Dado Ruspoli, Arianna De Rosa. Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra. Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Andrea Crisanti. Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni. Music: John Foxx. 

In the middle of Identification of a Woman, the protagonist, Niccolò (Tomas Milian), and his girlfriend, Mavi (Daniela Silverio), get lost in a fog. They emerge from it eventually, but they leave some of the audience behind, to judge from the rather chilly critical reception. Niccolò is a film director trying to focus his ideas for a new film, and you can see from his experiences how much of Antonioni's own frustration in trying to make his ideas cohere is reflected in the film. The difficulty may lie in the milieu, the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, with its triumphant resurgence of conservatism and capitalism -- so different from the angst-ridden, activist, youth-oriented 1960s in which Antonioni made his name. The political, social, and sexual concerns that seethed underneath the films of the '60s were exploded by Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970), leaving him lost for a subject. Even the sex in Identification of a Woman, though more explicit than his earlier films, has no heat, no risk, no daring. 

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian and Christine Boisson in Identification of a Woman

Niccolò: Tomas Milian
Mavi: Daniela Silverio
Ida: Christine Boisson 
Woman in Swimming Pool: Lara Wendel
Carla: Veronica Lazar
Nadia: Enrica Antonioni
Mavi's Sister: Sandra Monteleoni
Mario: Marcel Bozzuffi

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangeo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma
Production design: Andrea Crisanti
Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni
Music: John Foxx

As I said recently about his La Notte (1961), it helps when Michelangelo Antonioni has cast movie stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau in his films because they provide something of a backstory to his often enigmatic characters. Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, and Christine Boisson, attractive and capable actors though they are, don't do quite enough to illuminate what's going on with Niccolò, Mavi, and Ida in Identification of a Woman. It's a film that plays almost like a parody of the movies that Antonioni and other directors made 20 years earlier: There's a party filled with bored Eurotrash like the ones in La Notte, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1961), and Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1962); there's a film director trying to get over creative block like Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963); there's a search for a missing woman, though not so fruitless as the one in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960); there are some mutterings about imponderable philosophical questions, such as whether god would exist if human beings didn't; and there's a good deal of sex, still not enough to overcome the problems of the characters, though the nudity is more frontal and the copulation more explicit than it was two decades earlier. In short, we've been here before. Still, Identification of a Woman is not without its rewards, most of them provided by the wizardly color cinematography of Carlo Di Palma. His artistry and technique are on display in such scenes as the film's most memorable segment, the journey through the fog, as well as in the play with reflections (see the still above) in the Venetian hotel scene. They do more than the actors do to bring the film to what life it possesses. 

La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte

Lidia Pontano: Jeanne Moreau

Giovanni Pontano: Marcello Mastroianni 

Valentina Gherardini: Monica Vitti 

Tommaso Garani: Bernhard Wicki 

Gherardini: Vincenzo Corbella 

Signora Gherardini: Gritt Magrini 

Roberto: Giorgio Negro 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra 

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo 

Production design: Piero Zuffi 

Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 

Music: Giorgio Gaslini 

Movie stars often provide a shortcut to establishing the backstories of the characters they play. Once we see the bruised intelligence of Jeanne Moreau and the weary elegance of Marcello Mastroianni, familiar to us from their previous films, we know something about their characters, Lidia and Giovanni Pontano, that the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte doesn't need to tell us. We know there will be tension in their marriage, that Lidia will go for long solitary walks and that Giovanni will yield to almost any temptation that crosses his path. Giovanni is a successful writer, but the money that affords them a handsome apartment in Milan mostly comes from her, which gives her one reason to feel resentful when she's shunted aside by his celebrity. So La Notte is mostly about her lonely search for a raison d'etre while he indulges himself with the pleasures of the moment: the come-on of a sex-crazed woman in a hospital, a celebratory book-signing, a night club floor show, a flirtation with the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, a lucrative job offer from that industrialist. Lidia even seems to be trying to find ways of indulging herself the way her husband does: On her long walk through Milan, she plays at being a prostitute, throwing backward glances at men she passes on the street, though never making the essential connection. She tries to break up a fight between two young men from what seem to be rival street gangs, but when the shirtless victor of the fight pursues her, she flees. She gets a kind of erotic charge from watching a group set off skyrockets. And she escapes from the industrialist's elaborate all-night party, a kind of tepid orgy manqué, with a handsome young man, only to stop in mid-dalliance and ask him to return her to the party. And so at the end of the film we leave the Pontanos grappling in the dirt as the dawn appears, somehow destined to continue their perverse games. La Notte has more narrative coherence than the other two Antonioni films usually thought of as a trilogy, L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), which makes it essential in understanding what the director is up to. I take the currently prevailing view that Antonioni is less interested in existential alienation than in the lives of women in a society that valorizes male aggression. Hence the pivotal scene in which Lidia meets Valentina, the industrialist's daughter who has been toying with her husband, and instead of fighting they reach a kind of understanding, an assertion of female moral superiority. 

Le Amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)

Yvonne Furneaux, Eleanora Rossi Drago, Anna Maria Pancani, and Valentina Cortese in Le Amiche

Clelia: Eleanora Rossi Drago
Lorenzo: Gabriele Ferzetti
Cesare Pedoni: Franco Fabrizi
Nene: Valentina Cortese
Momina: Yvonne Furneaux
Rosetta: Madeleine Fischer
Mariella: Anna Maria Pancani
Tony: Luciano Volpato
Clelia's Employer: Maria Gambarelli
Carlo: Ettore Mani

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alba De Cespedes
Based on a novel by Cesare Pavese
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Production design: Gianni Polidori
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Giovanni Fusco

The usual rap on Michelangelo Antonioni's films by those who dislike them is that nothing happens, when in fact all sorts of things happen, from mysterious disappearances to murder. What sets Antonioni's films apart is that things happen almost randomly, without the usual dramatic buildup, and that the way his characters react to the things they witness or that happen to them is not usually the way we would react to them. So Le Amiche starts with an attempted suicide to which the sophisticated women who form the circle of "girlfriends" of the film's title react with a kind of detachment and indifference, even though the woman who tried (perhaps not very hard) to kill herself was one of them. Even Clelia, the outsider who will soon become part of the little circle and who discovers the unconscious Rosetta, seems to take the occurrence in her stride. The next on the scene is the brittle, cynical Momina, who knows Rosetta and accepts her suicide attempt as something like a part of the routine. And so we, along with Clelia, are thrust into a group of people in whom something essential seems to have atrophied, producing several fractured marriages and dead-end affairs. Clelia has come to Turin, the city where she grew up, to supervise the opening of a dress shop, part of a chain headed by the designer for whom she works. So it's the world of fashion superimposed on a place Clelia knew in the immediate postwar years as a grimy working-class city, and her point of view on the lives of the girlfriends is a special one. Partly in reaction against these wealthy women and their ineffectual men, Clelia takes up with Carlo, a supervisor on the construction of the shop, who shares her lower-class roots in the city. But you can't, as they say, go home again. The film is full of Antonioniesque touches that anticipate his major works of the 1960s. There's a visit to the beach where the behavior of the girlfriends and their men evokes some of the behavior that precedes the disappearance of Anna in L'Avventura (1960), and there's a breathtaking cut from the suicidal Rosetta walking away into the darkness to a high-angle shot of her white-shrouded body on the pier after she succeeds in killing herself. Antonioni antagonists will find nothing in Le Amiche to counter their charges of "arty ennui," but those of us who appreciate his work, even if we have to struggle sometimes, think this earlier film is almost the equal of his later work.

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point

Mark: Mark Frechette
Daria: Daria Halprin
Lee Allen: Rod Taylor
Cafe Owner: Paul Fix
Lee's Associate: G.D. Spradlin
Morty: Bill Garaway
Kathleen: Kathleen Cleaver

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe
Cinematography: Alfio Contini
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Music: Jerry Garcia, Pink Floyd

It sometimes seems as if every bad movie eventually finds an audience, even if only as fodder for wisecracks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Makers of bad movies even have movies made about them, like Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) or James Franco's The Disaster Artist, his upcoming film about Tommy Wiseau, the auteur of The Room (2003), a film whose badness turned it into a cult movie. Things get a little more complicated when the filmmaker is a director of the stature of Michelangelo Antonioni. Zabriskie Point is certainly a bad movie by any usual standards of plot or performance. Its endorsement of the revolutionary fervor of the young felt naive at the time and now seems at best simplistic. It was a critical and commercial flop: Roger Ebert called it "silly and stupid," and it banked only $900,000, against a cost of $7 million, on its initial theatrical run. But like another major flop, Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), it has been the subject of a continuing reassessment, attracting defenders and even a small coterie -- not to say cult -- of admirers, especially for its ending: a spectacular demolition of a desert house, with interpolated shots of the contents of a refrigerator and a closet being lofted in the air in slow motion. The fact remains, however, that Zabriskie Point really has nothing to say except that capitalist consumerism is bad and being young is good -- especially if you're hot. Neither point is made subtly and persuasively. The most glaring weakness is in the casting of its two young leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, who give almost hilariously inept performances as lovers drawn together in their rebellion. We never learn, for example, why Daria becomes so destructively disillusioned with her boss, real estate developer Lee Allen, that she imagines the cataclysm that ends the movie. It seems to have been inspired by her improbable encounter with Mark, who has stolen a small plane and, seeing her driving far below, decides to buzz her automobile. When he lands and they meet, they wander out into the desert, where they have sex. Their coupling is multiplied by a fantasy sequence of perhaps a score of couples rolling around in the dust. Incredible as the meeting of Mark and Daria is, it's perhaps more incredible that Antonioni, who had worked with actors of the caliber of Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, and Monica Vitti, should have found anything to work with in Frechette and Halprin, whose lack of affect and stilted delivery verge on the ludicrous. Still, the film always gives us something to look at. Cinematographer Alfio Contini has an especially keen eye for the absurd and ugly jumble of billboards and signs that clutter Los Angeles, but he's equally skilled at capturing the beauty of Death Valley and the high desert in Arizona. Too bad that the visuals only serve to reinforce the banal contrast between civilization's corruption and nature's purity.

Turner Classic Movies

Il Grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957)

Il Grido is Michelangelo Antonioni's last venture into something like neorealism before he moved away from conventional narrative film into the great trilogy of  L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962) that enthralled critics and tantalized audiences with their emotionally numb protagonists, unresolved stories, and symbolic use of the urban environment as a correlative for the alienation of the characters. Which is not to say that Antonioni doesn't make powerful symbolic use of the environment in which the events of Il Grido take place. It's set in the Po Valley near Ferrara, where Antonioni grew up. It's a flat, muddy, marshy, malarial environment for a story about Aldo (Steve Cochran), who has suddenly had all of his ideas about what it means to be a man thrown into question. For seven years, he has lived with Irma (Alida Valli), working as a mechanic in a sugar refinery and helping raise their daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). Irma's husband left her to seek work in Australia, and when word comes that he has died, Aldo suggests that they legitimize their relationship. But Irma wants to move on, and when she tells Aldo that she's found someone else, he beats her in the public streets, then quits his job, takes Rosina, and goes on the road in search of work. His odyssey puts him in contact with three other women, all of whom turn out to be stronger than the burly, macho Aldo. He goes to see an old girlfriend, Elvia (Betsy Blair), who still loves him but quickly discovers that she's better off without him around. He and Rosina hitch a ride on a petroleum tanker that drops him off at a filling station run by Virginia (Dorian Gray), with whom he begins an affair that makes him realize Rosina would be better off with her mother. But after sending her home, he decides he's unhappy being a kept man and sets off in search of work. He takes up for a while with Andreina (Lyn Shaw), a prostitute, but finally, depressed at being unemployed, returns to the town where he lived with Irma and finds her nursing a new baby, the refinery shut down, and the town being threatened with demolition to build an airfield for a military installation. When Irma learns of his return, she goes in search of him and finds him at the refinery, where he climbs to the top of a tower and falls to his death -- whether suicide or the consequence of the fatigue and weakness he exhibits, we're left to decide. Cochran never became the Hollywood leading man he sought to be, mostly finding tough-guy supporting roles in films like The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) and White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), but he gives an intensely physical performance in Il Grido. He's dubbed, of course, as is Blair, but post-synchronized dialogue was common in Italy at the time, and even Dorian Gray, who was Italian, was dubbed in Il Grido by no less than Monica Vitti, Antonioni's muse-to-be. Il Grido can be faulted as melodramatic, which the piano score by Giovanni Fusco tends to emphasize, but its compensatory strengths lie in Cochran's performance and in the use of the bleak, muddy landscape by Antonioni and cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo.

I Vinti (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

Fay Compton and Peter Reynolds in I Vinti

Why did they burn Joan of Arc? a character asks in Michelangelo Antonioni's I Vinti. Because she got involved in politics, another replies. It's a response befitting the disengaged youth that are the focus of the three episodes in Antonioni's film, the title of which is often translated as The Vanquished. They are the postwar generation in Europe, deprived of the political fervor that drove their parents' generation into war. But Antonioni has another reason for sniping at politics: It interfered with his efforts to make and distribute the film, which was banned in France until 1963 and never received theatrical distribution in the United Kingdom, even though two of the episodes were filmed in those countries. One of the reasons for the bans was legal: The episodes were based on actual incidents and could have led to prosecution on various grounds. But Antonioni was also forced to change his original plan for the Italian episode, which was to have been about a violent act of political protest, and instead make his protagonist a kind of rebel without a cause: a young man who turns to cigarette smuggling as a reaction against his wealthy parents. The film as released also is weighed down by a didactic prologue explaining that these are stories about the plague of what was then called "juvenile delinquency" -- a heavy-handedness uncharacteristic of Antonioni as artist. The first of the three episodes takes place in France: A group of high school students play hooky, telling their parents that they're going on a class field trip, and instead go to the countryside where, in the ruins of a chateau, a boy who has boasted of how much money he has -- he ostentatiously lights his pipe with a five-dollar bill -- is shot and robbed, only to reveal that the money is fake. The Italian episode features Franco Interlenghi as Claudio, whose venture into cigarette smuggling is busted by the police. On the run, he shoots and kills a guard, but he also takes a fall from which he apparently suffers internal injuries. Rescued by his girlfriend (Anna Maria Ferrero), he returns home, but dies before the police can arrest him. In the English episode, a police reporter (Patrick Barr) for a London newspaper receives a call from a man (Peter Reynolds) who claims to have discovered a body in a park and wants to be paid for his story. Relishing the celebrity his story brings him, he eventually admits to having murdered the woman (Fay Compton), a prostitute, and is sentenced to death. Slight as the three episodes are, they are vivified by sharp writing -- the screenplay is by Antonioni, Giorgio Bassani, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Diego Fabbri, Roger Nimier, and Turi Vasile -- and by the director's increasing virtuosity in placing his camera. The cinematography is by Enzo Serafin. Granted, what we often watch the early films of great directors for are signs of their future brilliance, and especially in the English section there are some striking foreshadowings of Blow-Up (1966). But making allowances for some of the restrictions under which Antonioni was working, I Vinti is impressive on its own. I was struck by the Hitchcockian humor in the English episode, when the reporter tangles with his unseen but hilariously incompetent switchboard operator. Unfortunately, the version I watched on FilmStruck retains the original dubbing of the French and English sections into Italian, but apparently there are undubbed DVD versions.

Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)

Ten years before L'Avventura, with its elegantly muddled and elliptically presented relationships, Michelangelo Antonioni was working in a mode clearly influenced by Italian neorealism and American film noir, though one that gives us glimpses of the filmmaker he would become. His first feature film, Story of a Love Affair, takes place in the realms of the wealthy postwar Italian business class. A Milanese industrialist, Enrico Fontana (Ferdinando Sarmi), has come across a cache of photographs of his wife, Paola (Lucia Bosè), and hires a detective agency to find out what it can about her early life. Paola, it seems, was friends with a woman, Giovanna, who died when she fell down an elevator shaft. Giovanna had been engaged to Guido (Massimo Girotti), who, when he learns that Paola's past is the subject of an investigation, goes to see her in Milan. They are both worried that they are under suspicion of causing Giovanna's death, which they witnessed. Guido and Paola fall in love and, realizing she is trapped in her marriage to Fontana, form a plot to murder him. But before Guido can kill him, Fontana dies in an auto accident. When the police arrive to inform her of his death, Paola, fearing that she will be arrested, runs out into the night to meet Guido, who tells her of the accident and agrees to meet her the next day. But when he gets into a waiting taxi, Guido tells the driver to go to the train station. Antonioni admitted that he was influenced by James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as the 1946 film version directed by Tay Garnett, in creating the lovers' plot to kill Fontana, but the ironic accident is his own invention, as is the mystery surrounding Fontana's death: Although Guido, who has been lying in wait to shoot Fontana, fails in his task, he hears the crash as well as what sound like gunshots, and arrives at the scene to see the body. He later tells Paola that there was a hole in Fontana's neck, as if he had been shot. The inconclusive ending, as well as the unresolved question of whether Paola and Guido were actually responsible for Giovanna's death, foreshadow Antonioni's later enigmatic approach to narrative, as does his use of the urban landscape as a correlative to the often bleak emotional states of his characters. The film shows its age with its shallow sonic ambience, in which scenes shot both indoors and outdoors have the same resonance, a symptom of the post-sync dialogue dubbing characteristic of Italian films of the period

L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

"Some like it cold. Michelangelo Antonioni on alienation, this time with Alain Delon and, of course, Monica Vitti. Even she looks as if she has given up in this one."

--Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

I'm still an admirer of Pauline Kael's film criticism, but it has dated. She did a great service in her heyday, the 1970s, by cutting through the thickets of snobbery to advance the careers of American filmmakers like Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah. But that often meant attacking "art house" filmmakers like Antonioni and Alain Resnais, poking at their supposed intellectual pretensions. Although I was never a "Paulette," my career as a professional film critic having been a matter of a few months reviewing for a city magazine, I think I qualified at least as a Kaelite: one who took her point of view as definitive. For a long time, I scoffed at films by Antonioni, Resnais, and others like Ingmar Bergman who got glowing notices from the high-toned critics but zingers from Kael. The bad thing is that I missed, or misinterpreted, a lot of great movies; the good thing is that I can spend my old age rediscovering them. And L'Eclisse is a great movie. One that, to be sure, Kael could dismiss as "cold" and mock for its director's use of Monica Vitti as a vehicle for his views on "alienation." I will grant that Vitti's limited expressive range can be something of a hindrance to full appreciation of the film. But it would have been a very different movie if a more vivid actress like Jeanne Moreau or Anna Karina or even Delphine Seyrig had played the role of Vittoria. Vitti's marmoreal beauty is very much the point of the film: She is irresistibly attractive and at the same time frozen. Alain Delon's lively Piero begins to become blocked and awkward in his attempts to rouse her passion. In the opening scene, in which Vittoria tells Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) that she's leaving him, the two behave in an almost robotic, mechanical way, unable to release anything that feels like a natural human emotion at the event. We see later that Vittoria is able to let herself go, but only when sex is not in the offing and when she is playing someone other than herself: i.e., when she blacks up and pretends to be an African dancer. But Marta (Mirella Ricciardi) puts a stop to this by saying "That's enough. Let's stop playing Negroes." Marta, a colonial racist who calls black people "monkeys," evokes the repressive side of European civilization, but L'Eclisse transcends any pat statements about "alienation" through its director's artistry, through the way in which Antonio plays on contrasts throughout. We move from the slow, paralyzed male-female relationships to the frenzy of the stock exchange scenes, from Vittoria's rejection of Piero's advances to scenes in which they are being silly and having fun. Nothing is stable in the film, no emotion or relationship is permanent. And the concluding montage of life going on around the construction site where Vittoria and Piero have seemingly failed to make their appointment is one of the most eloquent wordless sequences imaginable.

L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

The ironic title -- an "adventure" in which nothing adventurous occurs -- is enough to establish L'Avventura as one of the most subversive films ever made. It subverts narrative by never resolving its initial mystery, the disappearance of Anna (Lea Massari). And as a film about sex, it is notably anti-erotic. Antonioni's (and his cinematographer Aldo Scavarda's) camera is in love with Monica Vitti's Claudia, exploring her unconventional beauty in extended closeups. It is the "male gaze" -- the objectifying, depersonalizing view of women -- at its utmost. But then Antonioni subverts the male gaze by two scenes in which it is exposed in full and repellent play: The first is when the would-be celebrity Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo) causes a near-riot in the streets of Messina. The second, more bitter scene comes when Claudia, having left Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) to fetch Anna from the hotel in Noto where she thinks she may be staying, begins to be surrounded by more and more men, like a pack of feral dogs, casting eager, exploring stares at her. The sex in L'Avventura is troubled, like that between Anna and Sandro that earlier had left Claudia standing alone and idle in another street. Or the relationship of Claudia and Sandro that develops after Anna's disappearance, leaving neither of them particularly eager to find her. In the end, Sandro proves incapable of remaining faithful to Claudia, all too ready to ease his boredom with, of all people, Gloria Perkins, who returns to prowl the hotel in Taormina in search of paying customers. Before their liaison, Sandro is eyed by a woman who stands in front of a painting of Roman Charity, in which a woman breastfeeds an elderly man, a scene that blurs the distinction between charity and lust. After Claudia discovers Sandro and Gloria in flagrante, she flees the hotel in tears, followed by Sandro, and the film concludes with a scene in which her gestures, stroking his hair as he weeps, demonstrate her own form of charity -- or is it lust? L'Avventura presents us with a world in which the conventional and expected word and action never takes place. It was fashionable at the time the film was released to say that it was a depiction of alienation and ennui. But films about alienation and ennui invariably wind up alienating and boring, as many of the subsequent films made under its influence (including some of Antonioni's own) tediously demonstrated. L'Avventura didn't point out a viable direction for other movies, but it remains, like many great films, sui generis.  

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

Back in the day we would discuss for hours the significance of Thomas (David Hemmings) fetching an invisible tennis ball after having photographed an invisible murder. Then later we scrutinized the thematic relationship of Blow-Up to Antonioni's great trilogy of L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962). More recently, Blow-Up has figured large in discussions of the "male gaze." But lately it has become a historical artifact from a time and place half a century ago, the "swinging London" of the mid-1960s. And there I think it best belongs. What perhaps needs to be discussed is the tone of the film: Is it a document, or a celebration, or an exposé, or a satire? I think it is a bit of all of these, but mostly the tone is satiric. Thomas's aesthetic detachment, not to say voyeurism, makes him the perfect vehicle for an exploration of the era, from the grim flophouse he spends a night photographing to the drug-addled home of the wealthy, by way of a fashion shoot, a glimpse of what seems to be adulterous affair but may be a murder, a mini-orgy with some teenyboppers, a peek at two of his friends making love, and a performance in a rock club. All of it viewed with the impassive gaze of Thomas, Antonioni, and Carlo Di Palma's movie camera. Is it meant to be funny? Yes, sometimes, as when Thomas encounters the model Verushka at the party and says, "I thought you were supposed to be in Paris," and she replies, "I am in Paris." Or when we see the audience watching the performance of the Yardbirds in the club, showing no signs of enjoyment, but then going crazy when Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and flings it into the audience. Thomas escapes from the club with a piece of it, eludes the pursuing crowd, but throws it away when he realizes it's worthless. (A passerby picks it up, looks it it, and tosses it away.) It's a portrait of a cynical era in which people, as Oscar Wilde put it, know "the price of everything and the value of nothing." Hemmings, with his debauched choirboy* face, is the perfect protagonist, and Vanessa Redgrave, at the start of her career, is beautifully, magnificently enigmatic as the woman who may or may not have been involved in murder. I'm not sure it's a great film -- certainly not in comparison to Antonioni's trilogy -- but it will always be a fascinating one.

*Almost literally: Hemmings started as a boy soprano who was cast by Benjamin Britten in several works, most notably as Miles in the 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw. He can be heard on the recording made that year with Britten conducting.  

The White Sheik (Federico Fellini, 1952)

This antic comedy was Fellini's first solo feature, based on a story by, believe it or not, Michelangelo Antonioni, collaborating with Fellini and Tullio Pinelli. Ennio Flaiano joined Fellini and Pinelli to write the screenplay, which is about a young couple from the provinces honeymooning in Rome. The husband, Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste), doesn't know that his new wife, Wanda (Brunella Bovo), is an ardent fan of a fotoromanzo (a magazine serial that tells a story in photographs). When Wanda finds out that the serial, The White Sheik, is produced just around the corner from the hotel where she and Ivan are staying, she sneaks out in hopes of meeting Fernando Rivoli (Alberto Sordi), the actor who stars in the series as the sheik. Meanwhile, Ivan has scheduled their stay in Rome, including an audience with the pope, down to the minute, so when his family gathers to join the newlyweds and Ivan discovers that she has disappeared, madness ensues. Wanda finds herself swept up by the company photographing the next installment of the series and being wooed by the lecherous Rivoli himself. Ivan indulges in frantic attempts to cover up his wife's absence. Eventually he meets up with the prostitute Cabiria (Giulietta Masina), whose story Fellini will tell five years later in Nights of Cabiria (1957). For a first feature on his own, The White Sheik is remarkable, though it was quickly overshadowed by his next one, I Vitelloni (1953), which also featured Trieste in its cast. The White Sheik was only the second film for Trieste, who had appeared in a small role in Shamed (Giovanni Paolucci, 1947), for which he wrote the screenplay. He proved to be such an impressive character actor that he had a long career, with roles in such movies as Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986), and The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974).