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"Il dolce e l'amaro," women and men under the Antonioni microscope. Luxury wraps anguish, the posh Turin hotel has the lady from Rome (Eleonora Rossi Drago) in one room and in the other the distraught young mistress stuffed with sleeping pills (Madeleine Fischer). In town for the fashion boutique opening, the visitor is summarily pulled into the upper-crust circle of friends: The acerbic socialite (Yvonne Furneaux), the anxious ceramist (Valentina Cortese) and the flirty chiclet (Anna Maria Pancari), plus the fellas orbiting around them. Infidelity is the favorite theater of the wealthy, as De Sica would say, thus the painter (Gabriele Ferzetti) envious of his successful fiancée while stringing along the suicidal lass. Meanwhile, the Roman swan steps out with the construction foreman (Ettore Manni), maybe love will blossom amid modern concrete, in Italy "we specialize in miracles." The deft crisscrossing of affairs evinces a sharpened mastery of Hollywood technique (cp. Cukor's A Life of Her Own), the silken and brutal gradations of "social diplomacy" are just the grist for Antonioni's mill. Deep-focus groupings with a mobile camera, in and out of drawing rooms and up and down class strata—a search for antique furniture leads to tucked-away slums, a tilt from the penthouse reveals the maid's beau pacing into the night. The windswept beach outing is a nimble delineation of glances, spats and kisses in front of an uninviting ocean, it goes into L'Avventura with the girl who yearns to vanish and the wary Ferzetti embrace. (The train-station rendezvous for hesitant lovers is a melodramatic tradition analytically updated, the missed date is apocalyptically dilated in L'Eclisse.) "Can't we leave you girls alone for one moment?" Allen models half of Husbands and Wives on it (Bergman's A Passion furnishes the other half). With Franco Fabrizi, Maria Gambarelli, and Luciano Volpato. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |