User Rating
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast
Monica Vitti,
Richard Harris,
Carlo Chionetti,
Xenia Valderi,
Rita Renoir,
Lili Rheims
Genre
Drama
Amid the modern wastelands and toxic factories of Italy, wife and mother Giuliana desperately tries to conceal her tenuous grip on reality from those around her, especially her husband, Ugo. Ugo's old pal, Corrado, shows up in town on a business trip and is more sensitive to Giuliana's anxieties. They begin an affair, but it does little to quell Giuliana's existential fears.
A grim but beautiful portrait of a woman living in an oppressive environment. Surrounded by industrial desolation, Monica Vitti feels profoundly out of place to the viewer and to her character. Her reserved performance as a woman struggling to stay sane, combined with Antonioni's command of muted color cinematography, creates a vivid and subtly emotional cinematic experience.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.
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