You've seen what Michelangelo Antonioni can do with comfortable people who are bored and without soul. Wait until you see what he does with somebody who is insane.
The story is simple enough. The central figure is Monica Vitti. Her looks are unforgettable. She has startling eyes and a nose that looks borrowed from a Greek statue of not Aphrodite but Hera. She's the wife of a north Italian industrialist. She's had an accident and spent considerable time in the hospital, "because of the shock." The thing she's responding to is more than a simple shock.
The landscape in which she and her friends and family live is a polluted wasteland, with smokestacks emitting a sick yellow gas, ponds of waste that poison fish, and a constant barrage of mechanical noise as the gray gears grind. Beep beep; boop boop. Hwangg. Hisss. Her husband brings home a visitor, Richard Harris, with his battered Irish face, playing an Italian entrepreneur. He looks upon Vitti with interest, which is more than anyone else in the movie does.
At first, I thought that the landscape was having an inimical effect on Vitti's increasingly disturbed mind, but then -- a MESSAGE movie? From ANTIONIONI? The auteur of anomi? Then I realize that I'd mixed up the independent and dependent variables, and the forbidden landscape was a projection of Vitti's despair.
I'm going to kind of skip over the plot because there's really not much to it. It looks as if Antonioni had begun with an overall concept -- let's have people walk around and chat in a landscape drained of color and vitality except for the machinery. And the concept was fully realized. You have never seen such absolute grayness before. A peddler and his cart sit in front of a pale gray wall. The peddler's garb is the same color as the wall. So is his cart and even the wares in the cart. It looks as if he's part of the wall except that the smooth texture is broken up by a couple of irregular projecting bundles.
There is a scene in which half a dozen people squeeze into a riverside shack surrounded by cold fog. (The fog is gray. So is the shack.) There is one internal room that is painted bright red and everyone piles into it and begins laughing and chatting. But to keep the fire going, people begin to dismantle the board walls of the red room. Again, I tripped over a notion that was probably unintended: people destroying the world they live in for short-term gain.
So why, you ask, is Monica Vitti reduced to gibberish at the end, apologizing to a rough sailor who speaks no Italian? I don't know. When her young son appears to be ill, she makes up a story for him, about a young girl who lived on a beautiful beach in a beautiful land. The sun shone every day. Then a sailing ship appeared and the girl swam out to it, but although it looked full of splendor from a distance, close up she could see that no one was aboard, and the ship turned quietly around and sailed away. The girl returns to shore and hears a vibrant voice singing. She searches the island to find the source, but the source is everywhere. Even the buff rocks are singing.
The director has invested this scene with some importance because in illustrating it he uses a vivid palette -- glorious, sun-drenched, blazing yellow, ocher, and aquamarine. It knocks your socks off. I take it to suggest something like, well, we enter the world innocent and when we are young everything is pure, uncluttered, flowery and pregnant with pleasure. Then we encounter civilization and it corrupts us. That faint applause you hear comes from the grave of Jean-Jaques Rousseau.
But, okay, Antonioni began with this powerful concept, a polluted landscape mirroring a polluted mind. But then he had to fill up two hours with people standing around, staring at each other, arguing about whether fertilized quail's eggs are an aphrodisiac. Vitti ostentatiously gobbles down two hard-boiled quail eggs, not because she wants to get laid but because she needs to be loved.
She mistakes one for the other in an encounter with Richard Harris. Harris does a decent job of being a quiet and confident Italian, by the way. But his character is a genuine dullard. When Vitti expresses remorse over their affair, he advises her (in dubbed Italian) not to think about such things. But then she has to ask, as I always have, how do you NOT think about something? I guess if you're a zen master or something.
Nothing particularly dramatic happens. Nobody gets punched in the nose or does something embarrassing in public. There's a total absence of humor. But I couldn't stop watching it and found myself moved, whether I expected it or not.
The story is simple enough. The central figure is Monica Vitti. Her looks are unforgettable. She has startling eyes and a nose that looks borrowed from a Greek statue of not Aphrodite but Hera. She's the wife of a north Italian industrialist. She's had an accident and spent considerable time in the hospital, "because of the shock." The thing she's responding to is more than a simple shock.
The landscape in which she and her friends and family live is a polluted wasteland, with smokestacks emitting a sick yellow gas, ponds of waste that poison fish, and a constant barrage of mechanical noise as the gray gears grind. Beep beep; boop boop. Hwangg. Hisss. Her husband brings home a visitor, Richard Harris, with his battered Irish face, playing an Italian entrepreneur. He looks upon Vitti with interest, which is more than anyone else in the movie does.
At first, I thought that the landscape was having an inimical effect on Vitti's increasingly disturbed mind, but then -- a MESSAGE movie? From ANTIONIONI? The auteur of anomi? Then I realize that I'd mixed up the independent and dependent variables, and the forbidden landscape was a projection of Vitti's despair.
I'm going to kind of skip over the plot because there's really not much to it. It looks as if Antonioni had begun with an overall concept -- let's have people walk around and chat in a landscape drained of color and vitality except for the machinery. And the concept was fully realized. You have never seen such absolute grayness before. A peddler and his cart sit in front of a pale gray wall. The peddler's garb is the same color as the wall. So is his cart and even the wares in the cart. It looks as if he's part of the wall except that the smooth texture is broken up by a couple of irregular projecting bundles.
There is a scene in which half a dozen people squeeze into a riverside shack surrounded by cold fog. (The fog is gray. So is the shack.) There is one internal room that is painted bright red and everyone piles into it and begins laughing and chatting. But to keep the fire going, people begin to dismantle the board walls of the red room. Again, I tripped over a notion that was probably unintended: people destroying the world they live in for short-term gain.
So why, you ask, is Monica Vitti reduced to gibberish at the end, apologizing to a rough sailor who speaks no Italian? I don't know. When her young son appears to be ill, she makes up a story for him, about a young girl who lived on a beautiful beach in a beautiful land. The sun shone every day. Then a sailing ship appeared and the girl swam out to it, but although it looked full of splendor from a distance, close up she could see that no one was aboard, and the ship turned quietly around and sailed away. The girl returns to shore and hears a vibrant voice singing. She searches the island to find the source, but the source is everywhere. Even the buff rocks are singing.
The director has invested this scene with some importance because in illustrating it he uses a vivid palette -- glorious, sun-drenched, blazing yellow, ocher, and aquamarine. It knocks your socks off. I take it to suggest something like, well, we enter the world innocent and when we are young everything is pure, uncluttered, flowery and pregnant with pleasure. Then we encounter civilization and it corrupts us. That faint applause you hear comes from the grave of Jean-Jaques Rousseau.
But, okay, Antonioni began with this powerful concept, a polluted landscape mirroring a polluted mind. But then he had to fill up two hours with people standing around, staring at each other, arguing about whether fertilized quail's eggs are an aphrodisiac. Vitti ostentatiously gobbles down two hard-boiled quail eggs, not because she wants to get laid but because she needs to be loved.
She mistakes one for the other in an encounter with Richard Harris. Harris does a decent job of being a quiet and confident Italian, by the way. But his character is a genuine dullard. When Vitti expresses remorse over their affair, he advises her (in dubbed Italian) not to think about such things. But then she has to ask, as I always have, how do you NOT think about something? I guess if you're a zen master or something.
Nothing particularly dramatic happens. Nobody gets punched in the nose or does something embarrassing in public. There's a total absence of humor. But I couldn't stop watching it and found myself moved, whether I expected it or not.