Ramsey's Rambles
STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR By Ramsey Campbell
Cronaca di un amore 1950, NoShame Films, DD-2.0/ST/+, $29.95, 97m 58s, DVD-1
Last month, I looked at Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte. Now his earliest fic- tion feature is available on DVD. It doesn’t sim- ply sketch his later themes and methods; they’re already close to full development. As in L’Avventura, BLOWUP and THE PASSENGER, there’s a tension between genre and narrative ex- periment. Where L’Avventura abandons the cen- tral investigation in favor of other events, and BLOWUP interrupts the photographic development sequence with a bit of free love, STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR is founded on an investigation but con- centrates on the effects on the investigated. I would argue that Antonioni’s roots are more traditional than often noted, however.
Industrialist Enrico Fontana (Ferdinando Sarmi) hires Carloni (Gino Rossi), a Milanese private de- tective, to investigate his wife Paola (Lucia Bosé)— specifically, her past, which is represented by a handful of photographs. We may conclude that Fontana is concerned with the vivacity they ex- press by comparison with her present self. The couple has been married seven years after two months’ courtship. Carloni travels to Ferrara, where Paola left school not long before becoming in- volved with Fontana. The investigation scenes are deft and succinct, proof that Antonioni is perfectly capable of making a thriller (just as, despite the interruption, the development of the photographs in BLOWUP is compellingly suspenseful) but pre- fers to explore the repercussions of generic events. It’s striking that the early characters in the film—
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Carloni and the people he interviews at the school—are free of the ennui that affects so many of Antonioni’s protagonists, which is thematic rather than automatic. There’s a spontaneity and vitality about them not to be found in his later attempts to depict these traits—the mass sex scene in ZABRISKIE POINT, for instance, or the erotic sections of his episode of EROS.
Carloni discovers that Paola had two female friends at school: Giovanna, who died in an acci- dent, and Matilde (Vittoria Mondello). Matilde lives in a relationship moribund with habit (much like the marriage in La notte). Carloni’s visit prompts her to write to Guido (Massimo Girotti), Giovanna’s fiancé and Paola’s lover. The visit begins with an image that could be mistaken for a simple estab- lishing shot, but as it pans across the apartment building to display vistas of the Ferrara street—an aching urban emptiness reminiscent of de Chirico and underlined by Giovanni Fusco’s poignant score—we’re recognizably in Antonioni’s world. As fur-clad Paola leaves a concert on her 27th birthday, she sees Guido (now an unsuccessful dealer in cars) against a backdrop of vehicle post- ers. The cross-cutting opposes two worlds that will never finally meet, and she flees. Her marriage is already undermined by ennui, however, and, in the next scene, she greets Guido affectionately on the phone. They meet at the edge of the city to discuss Matilde’s letter, but even here the land- scape is beset by stone. Meanwhile, Carloni dis- covers a newspaper report of Giovanna’s fall down
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