Michelangelo Antonioni’s best films are usually set in a landscape or site that he wants to explore (e.g., the island in
“L’Avventura,” Milan in “La Notte“). And the primary character’s emotional life is primarily evoked through their walking through and reacting to the external world. The image is at the film’s center, rather than its meaning being conveyed through dialogue or exposition. According to Antonioni, his films “are born in the same way that poetry is born for poets,” evolving from “everything that we read, hear, think, and see.” At a certain moment, it all turns into concrete images, and then the images are shaped into stories.
Antonioni’s early works tended to be more socially realistic and concrete than his more elusive later films. However, “Il Grido” (1957) acts as a bridge between his documentaries like “N.U.” (“Nettezza Urbana”). Antonioni’s second documentary, which follows a day in the life of street sweepers and his best-known, more abstract later films that are totally and elegantly committed to conveying alienation and existential despair. It has been restored by The Film Foundation, Cineteca di Bologna, and Compass Film and is receiving a theatrical release from Janus Films starting at Film Forum on November 8.
Set in northeastern Italy’s Po Valley during a wet, dreary winter, its focus is on an oil-refinery worker, Aldo (played by American actor Steve Cochrane), who begins to drift from woman to woman along with his daughter after being rejected by the woman he lives with, Irma (Alida Valli). Irma informs him she has fallen in love with another man with little explanation, except that “her love for him has changed”—setting the enigmatic and at times mysterious pattern that dominates most relationships for the rest of Antonioni’s films.
Aldo then sets out to escape his shattered life and visits an old girlfriend, Elva (American actress Betsy Blair). She is both eager and wary, but he is sullen and still obsessed with Irma. He takes off again, dragging his young daughter along. The road seems interminable, and the gray, misty skies and mud along the canals and waterways powerfully express Aldo’s despairing emotional state. The compositions and extended long shots are consistently striking, prefiguring what Antonioni even more luminously achieved in 1960s works like “Red Desert.”
There are other women who pick him up along the road: a feisty gas-station owner, whose bed he shares and whose customers he helps take care of, and a sex worker. He is unable to stay long with either of them—his anguish undermining any capacity to connect with another woman. The women are much less interesting than the journey Aldo is on. Antonioni helps capture his alienation with long shots that convey the distance between Aldo and his daughter and the other women as they walk or stand still.
Aldo soon decides to return home but is then forced to confront the fact that Irma is happy with another man and an infant and has moved on with her life.
The film does suggest that Italy of the 1960s suffers from economic problems, and Aldo’s town is confronted on his return with a mass demonstration against building a proposed airport. But that is not what the film is basically concerned with. In the film’s final five minutes, Aldo climbs the tower of the old sugar factory he used to work in, plunging to his death in front of Irma. The movie offers no solace or sudden redemption—just hopelessness. A powerful conclusion to a film where Antonioni projects an arresting style and vision that become more subtle and complex in the works that follow.
