So this is a movie by Michelangelo Antonioni, whom we have previously seen on this list back at #21, with L’Avventura, a movie that played with narrative expectation and convention by setting up a disappearing-person mystery and then… just ignoring it, and having its characters fuck around and kill time for the rest of the movie. This is apparently considered to be part of a loose “trilogy” with that movie, and it’s easy to see why.

So it starts with a tense scene between an engaged couple, and there’s some back and forth anger, the woman leaves, he chases her… and it’s easy to think, okay, this is one of those movies about the end of a relationship. But you’re wrong, because she keeps leaving, and even though he shows up at her place later, she ignores him, and that’s the end of that.

And then we get into the rambling middle of the movie, where we follow that female character as she… kinda randomly does stuff? She hangs out with friends, she visits her mom at the stock market, she goes on a plane ride, and in one memorable scene, she dresses up in blackface and does some faux-tribal dancing.

(It’s an odd scene, because she’s doing this at the apartment of a (white) friend who lives in Kenya, and that friend angrily tells her to stop it… but then goes on to unleash a torrent of even-Jeff-Sessions-might-be-embarrassed racism herself. There’s actually a really good essay that analyzes this scene, and how neither of the characters are meant to be an audience stand-in, and the audience is expected to be somewhat uncomfortable with this and read things into it about who these people are. And I think there’s a lot to that; but I think it’s also undeniably true that no director in 2017 (this is from 1962) would include a scene like this to try to get at those themes, because like wow.)

So anyway, amidst this aimlessness we also spend some time watching a dude at the stock market, which is weirdly fascinating on its own, both in trying to figure out the mechanics of how the hell the market actually worked (it seems to be just people shouting at each other and scribbling down notes, yet apparently binding legal transactions are being done in this process? I have a hard time seeing how), and in seeing the emotion that sweeps the scene as a major crash makes itself apparent. (A crash which is later literalized when the stockbroker’s car is stolen by a drunk, who drives it into a body of water, from which it is later retrieved with the drunk’s corpse still in the car. The stockbroker, watching the retrieval of the car and corpse, is talking about how he’s going to try to sell it, because if there’s one lesson of this movie, it’s that finance people have been selfish assholes since forever.)

And at this point, we’ve got a female lead, we’ve got a male lead, and sure enough, they start flirting with each other. And I had a hard time reading this relationship. Because one thing that’s abundantly clear about the past is that the courtship patterns people went through varied a lot from the things that we would think of as normal/acceptable today, right. And there’s definitely some of that in the movie; the dude makes moves — grabbing her and going in for a kiss as she turns around to face him unawares — that would be unquestionably sexual assault today, but that was maybe an expected mode of behavior then and there, because she’s neither surprised nor offended, in general.

But so then she’s super-ambiguous about the whole thing, ultra-flirty one moment and serious and pulling back the next, and I think there’s maybe a part of that that’s supposed to be that old cultural script, too, but I think it’s meant to go beyond that and show actual ambivalence about the relationship on her part.

Particularly because of the end of the movie, which… one of the things you see about some of the movies on this list is that they’ll be whatever they are for the most part, but then there’ll be this one scene that stands out as being about a zillion times better than the rest of the movie. L’Atalante had its love scene, Battleship Potemkin has the Odessa Steps, and this movie has its ending, which I am about to spoil for you.

Spoilers

So as our lovers had last parted, they said they’d meet at 8:00 PM at their usual place. And so the camera cuts to there. And make no mistake, this is their usual place; we’ve seen them meet there repeatedly over the course of the movie. And so the camera goes to this place, and everything seems normal… except that there are violins doing that atonal creeping-horror thing. And the camera focuses on little landmarks that we’ve seen before, like a water barrel. And then it cuts to pieces of buildings, then close-ups on the faces of bystanders looking at nothing in particular. A horse-and-cart, which we’ve seen before, goes by. The back of a woman’s head, who we think might be our lead, but then she turns, and it isn’t. A wide shot of the street completely empty. A bus. People getting off, including a man reading a paper with headlines about the tension of nuclear standoff. The sky. Buildings. The sun. And all the while, this eerie music underlying it all, building to some horrifying revelation.

Then, “Fine.” and cut to credits.

It’s a totally bonkers ending. It’s not in any way how you’d end a movie about a romance — whether they show up or they don’t, there’s no sensible way on earth that you’d film it like that. But of course, this isn’t really a movie about a romance, anyway, it’s a movie about a period between romances, a kind of interwar period, except for relationships. And even at that, this isn’t really an ending that the movie was building to in any way, but it’s compelling and unnerving in a way that makes it totally effective all the same.