Next up in this zillion-way tie at #169 on the S&S list is this movie from Michelangelo Antonioni, who you may remember from such films as L’avventura and L’eclisse. Like those, this one stars Monica Vitti; unlike those, this one is in color.

Like a lot of directors making their first color movie, he really uses the colors; but being the kind of arch mid-century intellectual he is, he uses it to a large extent to make his shots as maximally drab and monochromatic as possible. Some of this is natural — the movie takes place in and around a bunch of factories, which have some inherent grayness — but some of it is pure artifice, most notably when all the fruit on a fruit cart has been painted gray. (Apparently they also painted a forest gray — this movie was made before environmentalism, as we’ll talk about — but then ended up not using it because the light was wrong.)

So this movie is really about two things. The first is those industrial landscapes. Antonioni was apparently inspired by the postwar development of Ravenna into an industrial town, and what that meant for the area around it. To the extent that any of the landscapes in this movie are real, it is fucking bleak, because this looks like a hellscape. There’s a dead lake, there are areas full of soot and ash, there are smokestacks belching bright yellow smoke that a character calmly notes is lethal to birds.

But he’s not making an environmentalist film that decries this despoliation of nature. It’s clear in how the movie is shot that he thinks this is all beautiful in its own way.[1] And it is! The shots are gorgeous in this, whether the palettes of a scene are monochromatic or with pops of color. His previous movies looked good, but this one looks incredible.

So that’s one thing. The second thing the movie is about is Monica Vitti’s character. She plays the wife of a factory owner, and she is… well, Antonioni says “neurotic,” but no, she’s straight up mentally ill, like she seems to have difficulty sometimes telling what’s real or behaving in appropriate ways.

And so her husband early in the film introduces her to a fellow industrialist, and the guy immediately develops a crush on her, and finds an excuse to go seek her out to flirt with her. His flirting doesn’t really go well at first, because she’s too trippy to even understand that he’s flirting, but he is not dissuaded and keeps following her around places.

Later, there’s a super weird scene where she’s with her husband, another couple, this guy, and a woman (who I think is supposed to be a sex worker, but maybe not?) at this shack on the riverside, and they all crawl into this weird bed-room[2] and engage in a bunch of innuendo-laden talk and touching that seems on the verge of turning into an orgy, but never quite does.

Later still, a bunch of shit has happened to Vitti’s character to make her even more distraught and to make her hold on reality more tenuous. She seeks out this guy for comfort, and he pretty much just straight up ignores how distraught she is and tries to seduce her. Although, “seduce” might not be exactly the right word. Wikipedia’s description of this scene says “Initially she resists Corrado’s advances, but they eventually have sex.” And I feel like it’s written in that passive-voice neutral tone, because it is genuinely difficult to tell how consensual this sex is intended to be.

To some extent, this is a common problem with Italian movies of this era; the way the culture of that time handled consent is basically illegible to me. Multiple times, I’ve watched scenes in Antonioni and Fellini movies (and gialli for that matter) that I thought were depicting sexual assault until it became clear that they were passionate consensual acts. This scene, though, I think actually is intended to be an assault, but I’m not 100% sure about that, which is a weird place to be.

Either way, at best it’s a cruel seduction, because sex is not what she needs right then, and this is super-obvious to him, and he just doesn’t care. As a result, she falls deeper into isolation and alienation, and tries to leave on a ship, but fails when a sailor doesn’t even speak her language, really driving home the whole isolation/alienation theme harder.

And that’s basically the movie. If this doesn’t sound very plot-heavy to you, welcome to Antonioni. For my part, this is a film that I liked a great deal, and whose virtues are clear — it really is super-gorgeous, Vitti is a great actress, the movie is never dull even without strong narrative to drive it forward. But, unlike the critics who put it on their top ten lists, I didn’t really love it. But hey, here we are, down at #169, so that feels like a fair placement (and still pretty high praise for a movie, tbh).

  1. (After I wrote this, I felt like it was a bold enough claim that I ought to at least make sure I wasn’t saying something that was directly against the critical consensus; I’d feel like an idiot if I wrote that it wasn’t an environmentalist film and then actually it was some huge key movie in the Italian environmental movement. But amazingly, I found Antonioni saying precisely what I thought the movie was saying: “It’s too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention … was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing.”) ↩︎

  2. Like, it’s a room the size of a bed, of which effectively the “floor” is the bed, with walls on all sides. ↩︎