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Michelangelo Antonioni's first feature and already an identification of a woman, glamour snapshots of the leading lady are scattered on a desk after the titles, "no, not the same old story." Ferrara is a town of old secrets (the camera pans as the detective turns a street corner and suddenly it's a De Chirico exterior), Milan by contrast evinces no memory of the war amid the luxury of the new decade. The socialite (Lucia Bosé) and the car dealer (Massimo Girotti) were once lovers, seven years after the break-up they're reunited by an investigation started by her husband (Ferdinando Sarmi), an industrialist who knows the old joke about a married woman's affection being measured in migraines. Shared guilt and illicit meetings, out of the planetarium and through the rainswept park with leafless trees, a fashion auction at the nightclub. (The flirt modeling the gown doffs it off and is told to keep it, "can you explain a whim?") Antonioni's heritage is film noir and telefoni-bianchi melodrama, his great discovery is the Preminger mobile medium-shot that can modulate in and out of a close-up. His raven-haired heroine glides through a swank party (playing a brisk game of bridge, humoring a matron wielding a lapdog, pirouetting with a tuxedo rake in a continuous movement), then suggests murder in a cabin while chugging locomotives are heard outside. (An earlier rendezvous is announced by a Maserati zipping between two oversized vermouth-bottle advertisements.) The analytical photographic effect has Bosé in a black ensemble sprawled on a white fur-lined bedspread and Girotti anxiously reprising his Ossessione role on a bridge at night. Gunshots or slippery road? "Una specie di testamento spirituale" closes on a vortex of damp asphalt and street lights, Malle in Ascenseur pour l'échafaud takes another look at the situation. Cinematography by Enzo Serafin. With Gino Rossi, Marika Rowsky, and Franco Fabrizi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |