Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Year Released: 1962
Rating: 3.5
Monica Vitti leaves one man she's unsatisfied with and falls in with another (Alain Delon), a yuppie who runs himself ragged for money. Perhaps the most convincingly dream-like I've seen Antonioni - I swear that, even though wide awake, I was 'drifting' along with the images, from day to night and back again, as Vitti walks, walks, walks and ends up all over town, waiting for a 'conclusion,' but finding none. Though it (like Antonioni's other films) is about the disconnection between the characters, it's also about the real distance between the viewer and the images happening on the screen: a woman lives her life, more or less, and it's both engrossing (because Vitti is engrossing) yet perfectly mundane (the same way Akerman's Jeanne Dielman is). Only when the final images of buzzing street lights and symmetrical buildings pile up on one another does Antonioni's deeper point - about the difficulty of love (Delon and Vitti kiss each other through a window twice, for example) and the pointless pursuit of riches (he shows men in hysterics trading stocks) - really sink in.
