24 Shoeshine (1946)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica


We are the people who, in pursuit of our passions, abandon our children to fend for themselves. And our children are alone. All alone.

In the 1940s Vittorio de Sica directed three of the best and most moving films about children ever made—The Children Are Watching Us (1942), Shoeshine (1946), and Bicycle Thieves (1948). In each of these films, children find themselves in a world where the behavior of adults makes little sense to them, where they are powerless to control their own lives, and where they are unable to protect themselves from disappointment and hurt. It's a sad, mystifying world for children, de Sica seems to be saying, and we adults are too self-involved to feel their pain and confusion and help them through it.

In Shoeshine two boys, Pasquale and Giuseppe, live in poverty just after the end of the Second World War in Italy, shining shoes for American servicemen to finance their dream, to own a horse. They've been making payments on the horse for a while but can't claim him until they make one large final payment. When Giuseppe's older brother offers them a way to make part of the money they need for that payment, they jump at the opportunity, even though it involves doing something shady, delivering stolen American blankets to an elderly fortune teller for resale on the black market. While at the apartment, Giuseppe's brother shows up with two men who identify themselves as policemen. The boys appear to have been set up as pawns in a sting operation but are lucky to escape and are able to keep all the money from the transaction as well, enough to make the final payment on their horse.

The boys are so ecstatic that they spend the night in the stable with their horse, only to find the next day that their good fortune has turned sour. Picked up by the police, they are accused of being accomplices in the robbery of the fortune teller, for the two men were not policemen at all. The most damning evidence against them is that large sum of money they used to make the final payment on the horse. The boys cannot explain where they got the money without implicating Giuseppe's brother, and their sense of honor won't let them do this. Unable to convince the police that they had no prior knowledge of the robbery, Pasquale and Giuseppe are sent to a juvenile prison to await trial.

Only twenty minutes into the movie the circumstantial trap the two boys find themselves in has already snapped shut, and from there things only go downhill. Separated at the detention center, the boys find their friendship and loyalty to each other constantly challenged—by their cellmates, by manipulative prison officials who try to play one boy against the other, and most of all by the soul-destroying machinery of the justice and penal system. The film blends elements of a Warners-style prison movie of the 1930s with a Kafkaesque atmosphere in which the boys are caught up in institutional machinery beyond anyone's comprehension or control.

The prison is a hellish place plagued by overcrowding, bad food, bullying inmates, and corrupt guards. Any of the prison staff with good intentions have long ago given up hope of improving conditions. At every turn the boys are duped—by their adult criminal confederates, their cellmates, the prison officials, even their lawyers. Worst of all, the degradation Pasquale and Giuseppe suffer is not the result of intentional malice, but simply the outcome of neglect, indifference, the self-concerned attitude of the adults in charge of them, and the impossible situation they find themselves in. To call these boys helpless victims of circumstance would be putting it too mildly.

Throughout it all, the horse the boys love—the horse is the first thing we see in the film and the last—remains a symbol of their hope. Their hope for freedom, for a connection to the natural world which the grim conditions of their urban environment denies them, for the affection Giuseppe, the son of impoverished war refugees, and the orphaned and homeless Pasquale experience only from each other. When the boys are separated from their horse and from each other, they are set adrift and become prey to all the worst personal and social evils that come their way.

Shoeshine isn't as well remembered today as other films of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, in part perhaps because it has never received a deluxe home video release by a company like Criterion and is revived less often than better known neorealist films. Yet it has made a strong impression on some very knowledgeable people. Martin Scorsese admired de Sica's empathy with his child characters: "There are no barriers at all between de Sica and these children whose tragic lives he understood perfectly." Orson Welles once called it the best movie he had ever seen and praised its invisible technique, remarkable praise indeed from a director of such highly visible technique. Welles was certainly justified, though, to recognize that de Sica was too savvy to allow a showy style to distract from the highly charged emotions of the story or the truth in the performances of his actors.

In 1948 Shoeshine became the first film ever to receive a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best foreign language film of the year. (This didn't become an official category until the 1956 awards year.) The Academy's citation stated that it was chosen because "the high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity." This seems an unintentionally ironic way to put it, in view of the way the bleak conditions in postwar Italy are mirrored by the film's unflinchingly bleak outlook. Not only do Pasquale and Giuseppe not triumph over adversity, but on the contrary are thoroughly crushed by it.

You might also be interested in:

• Umberto D. (1952)
• Two Early Films by Italian Masters: The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
• My Voyage to Italy (1999)

This post is part of the Horseathon, which runs May 25-28. For more information and a schedule of posts, visit the host site, My Love of Old Hollywood.

39 Umberto D. (1952)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

A great film about what it is like to stand by and watch helplessly as you slip into poverty and even your dignity becomes excess baggage.

—Martin Scorsese on Umberto D.

In the 1940s Vittorio de Sica directed a string of movies that were both popular and critical successes, movies that helped focus the world's attention on Italian cinema and the emergent postwar film movement of neorealism. These films centered on children and told stories largely from their point of view—pictures like The Children Are Watching Us (1944), Shoeshine (1946), and The Bicycle Thieves (1948). In 1951 de Sica turned his attention in a different direction, to a bleak story about an impoverished elderly man and his dog. The picture, Umberto D., was De Sica's first box-office flop in Italy, and its failure prompted him to turn away for nearly a decade from the serious subjects and realistic presentation of the hugely influential school of filmmaking he helped pioneer. Today Umberto D. is generally considered one of his two greatest works, along with The Bicycle Thieves. De Sica himself cited it as his own personal favorite of his films.

Umberto D. opens with a scene that might have come directly from a modern newscast. Down a street in Rome a large group of people march toward the camera, waving placards and chanting slogans. As they approach, we see that these are not ordinary street protesters but dignified elderly men dressed in overcoats, hats, suits and ties. They are retirees who, seeing their fixed incomes eaten up by inflation, are shouting "Justice for pensioners" and pressing for a raise in their pensions. Near the front of the demonstration is an elderly man accompanied by a small dog. The man is Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant, and the dog is his Jack Russell-like mongrel, Flike. When the police arrive and break up the demonstration, Umberto and Flike scurry away. "I'm just a good-for-nothing old man," he says to another pensioner, explaining that he is in debt, has no relatives to help him, is plagued by a persistent cough and fever, and is about to be evicted from his room because he is a month behind in his rent.

The film is Umberto's story, and he is in every scene, everything shown from his point of view. The plot of the movie is quite simple, a series of small everyday events that little by little give us a complete picture of Umberto's life in all its abject humiliation and hopelessness. Umberto responds to his dire circumstances with a series of increasingly desperate actions. He sells his possessions, beginning with his gold watch and his books. He tries begging in the street but cannot bring himself to carry through with it. Instead he has Flike sit up and beg with a hat in his mouth while he hides behind a nearby building. When an old acquaintance recognizes the dog, Umberto runs up and tells him that Flike is only playing. He even contrives to have himself admitted to the hospital so that he can save the money he would ordinarily spend on food to apply toward his back rent.

After Umberto is released from the hospital, his situation begins to go seriously downhill. He returns home to find that his landlady is redecorating the apartment in an absurdly frou-frou style, the wallpaper half stripped from the walls of his room, a huge hole knocked in the wall between his room and the next one. Umberto's world seems to be literally crumbling around him. Worst of all, Flike is missing. Rushing to the animal shelter to look for his dog, he is horrified by the casual indifference to the fate of the animals there and barely manages to rescue Flike before he is euthanized. Returning to his room late that night, he finds himself standing at his window looking into the deserted street below, and we can tell from the numb expression on his face and a quick zoom to the pavement below that he is about to jump. It is only when he turns around and sees Flike sitting on the bed waiting for him that he abandons his suicidal thoughts, at least for the moment.

In Umberto D. de Sica, like Chaplin in his films, presents the world as a place populated by victimizers and the victimized. When people are not outright malicious like Umberto's callous, social-climbing landlady, they are indifferent to the suffering of others. Just about the only other person in the film who elicits a sympathetic reaction is Maria, the meek, kind-hearted teenage maid in the apartment where Umberto lives. When Umberto packs his belongings and sneaks out in the middle of the night, he unexpectedly encounters Maria on the staircase and says goodbye to her. The dejected expression on his face makes it clear that he has given up all hope and decided to kill himself and that Maria—like himself another of life's sad victims and the only person in the film to show him any affection—is the one person he will be genuinely sorry to leave behind.

Much of the second half of the film is occupied with Umberto's futile attempts to make some sort of provision for Flike's future. No matter what he tries, though, nothing seems to work out. Apparently convinced that he and his dog are destined to stay together until the end, he finally takes Flike in his arms and walks around the barrier at a train crossing and toward an oncoming train. When the terrified dog leaps from his arms and runs away, cringing behind a tree, this rejection is too much for Umberto and he pursues Flike, wheedling him until he comes back. De Sica might portray Umberto's world as an inhumane place, but in the end he declines to treat his viewers with such cruelty. If we can't be certain what the future holds for Umberto and Flike, we now know that for them there will at least be some kind of future. In a final scene reminiscent of the one in Chaplin's Modern Times, we last see the old man and his dog walking away from us down a path in the park, playing fetch with a pine cone.

This ambiguous ending might seem a timid one, the result of a reluctance by de Sica to follow through on the grim situation he has set up so relentlessly, but I think closer examination tells us it is not entirely arbitrary. If Umberto's pride has been the thing that has kept him going this long, the inflexibility and selfishness it has engendered have also been his greatest flaws. Perhaps his concern for Flike manages to chip away enough of that stubborn pride to make him more adaptable and less self-involved. After all, his resources may be limited, but he does have resources. And it's a psychological truism that nothing can take us out of ourselves and help us transcend self-pity like loving someone else more than we love ourselves. Maybe in the end, rather than Umberto saving Flike, the truth is the reverse, and it is Flike who saves Umberto.

There is no doubt that of all the neorealist filmmakers, de Sica had the strongest streak of sentimentality, and my description of Umberto D. might make it sound quite the tearjerker. But de Sica didn't see the film that way, maintaining that rather than being sentimental, it was a realistic film made "without compromise." I think he was being absolutely honest when he said this, because even though the subject of the picture might break your heart, de Sica does present it in a totally realistic, unmanipulative way. This is a technically simple film with no fancy camera work and only one brief instance of showy editing, when the train is bearing down on Umberto and Flike and de Sica uses some rapid cutting and the shrill sound of the train whistle for heightened effect. Otherwise he makes no overt attempt to pull the viewer's emotional strings either through technical means or through overemphasis, recognizing the powerful emotional force of the story and standing aside to let it do its work.

Still, there's no denying that Umberto D. is a litmus test of any viewer's susceptibility to sentiment in film: if this movie doesn't melt your heart, none ever will. It's the kind of movie which contains scenes, situations, and images—and inspires emotional responses—that you will never forget. And it contains two of the greatest performances ever committed to film. One by seventy-two year old Carlo Battisti, a retired professor from Florence who made exactly one movie in his life, as Umberto. The other by a mongrel named Napoleone as his devoted canine friend Flike.

You might also like:
• Two Early Films by Italian Masters: The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Story of a Love Affair (1950)
• My Voyage to Italy (1999)

This post is part of the Classic Movie Dogathon hosted by the Classic Film & TV Cafe, which runs February 19-22. Click here for the full schedule.

0 La Terra Trema (1948)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Luchino Visconti

The postwar Italian neorealist school of cinema has to be one of the most influential movements in film history. Neorealism came about almost by accident when the Italian film industry resumed after Liberation and directors were forced by the lack of studio facilities and a dearth of trained actors to turn to real locations and nonprofessional actors. What began as an adjustment of subject and technique to practical necessity quickly became a full-blown aesthetic, as these filmmakers, most of whom had experience making documentary films, found inspiration in events of the war and the immediate postwar era and sought to break down—or at least create the illusion of breaking down—the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in movies.

Within ten years, though, neorealism in its original form no longer existed. Roberto Rossellini had moved on to more personal stories starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman, while Vittorio de Sica, with his more sentimental brand of neorealism, had progressed to projects of greater universality like Umberto D. Luchino Visconti's directing career followed a similar path. His first fiction film, Ossessione (1942), was based on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. This was a proto-neorealistic work that, in its use of actual locations and unglamorous, often untrained actors, looked ahead to the first truly neorealist film, Rossellini's Open City (1945), while approaching Cain's theme of doomed, obsessive love in a more conventional way, treating it with an eroticism and emotional pitch of near-melodramatic intensity. From the 1950s on, Visconti made films that departed ever further from neorealism, films with an increasing emphasis on ornate pictorial values and almost operatic emotions. (Visconti called the style of these later pictures neoromanticism.) But between Ossessione and his later, more sensuous and grandiose movies, Visconti made a film that is the purest expression of neorealism I've seen, La Terra Trema (1948).

6 My Voyage to Italy (1999)

Country: Italy-US
Director: Martin Scorsese

"I like to think of neorealism as the seed from which a beautiful, solid tree has grown, and the branches on that tree represent virtually all the major Italian filmmakers of the postwar era."

—Martin Scorsese in My Voyage to Italy

My Voyage to Italy—part reminiscence, part film essay—is Martin Scorsese's splendid four-hour long valentine to post-World War Two Italian cinema. Concentrating on movies made between Open City (1945) and 8½ (1963), it examines the origins of the neorealist movement, which he calls "the most precious moment in film history," and its influence on Italian cinema. Scorsese focuses on the five most important directors who came out of the movement and have been inspirations both for his own films and in one way or another for nearly all Italian films made after them.

Scorsese spends the first half hour of his documentary relating how as a boy he first became acquainted with Italian cinema—by watching subtitled Italian movies shown on television on Friday nights with his family and neighbors, beginning with the first Italian movie he ever saw, the neo-realist Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. He tells how his grandparents, immigrants from Sicily who never even became American citizens, and his family's friends and neighbors in New York's Little Italy, where he grew up, gathered at his home to watch these movies for scenes of their homeland and to hear the Sicilian dialect they spoke themselves being spoken by the actors in the movies. The experience was the first time he really became aware of his own family's origins, and for a young boy already fascinated with the American movies he saw regularly with his father, he found that a new world of cinema had opened to him. Interspersed with excerpts from Italian films are home movies of his own family and neighborhood in the late 1940s. Together they paint a vivid picture of Scorsese's own boyhood, both the real and the imaginary.

3 Two Early Films by Italian Masters

The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

The Children Are Watching Us, made in 1942 but not released until two years later, is a superior tearjerker that, being told largely from a child's point of view, anticipates Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thieves. The child is a boy about five years old, Pricò. His family is middle class: The father works as an accountant, they live in a modern apartment block in Rome with a live-in housekeeper, and the mother is secretly having a love affair. The movie opens with his mother taking Pricò to the park to watch a puppet show, after which she sends him off to play while she meets her lover, who is trying to pressure her into running away with him. Unknown to her, however, Pricò is watching from a distance, and although he doesn't really understand what is happening, he knows instinctively that it is something which threatens the security of his comfortable life.

This sequence sets the tone of the rest of the movie. As Pricò observes from a distance, we see nearly everything that happens from his point of view. When his mother abandons the family for her lover, we see his sadness and confusion, and we share his sense of being lost as he is passed from one relative to another, each one less sympathetic and caring toward him than the last. We also sense his joy when, after he becomes seriously ill, his mother returns. But even though she resolves to break off her relationship with her lover, he is so persistent that she eventually finds herself torn between him and her child.

0 I Vitelloni (1953)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini

What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.

The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.

I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).

With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.

But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.

Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.

One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.

0 L'Eclisse (1962)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.