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Along with abstract enigmas, modernity also offers its share of concrete irritations, like getting locked out of your apartment. ("When they divorced, she took her fears with her but the alarm system stayed.") The bemused seeker is a blocked regista (Tomás Milián), "a feeling in female form" is his guiding sun, the old Ewig-Weibliche in the new decade of synths and cutout mannequins. The socialite (Daniela Silverio) is close-cropped and sharp-featured, a teasing voice on the gynecologist's telephone and an inflamed figure beneath billowing bedsheets. Her aristocratic edginess contrasts with the pastoral ease of the theater thespian (Christine Boisson), who recognizes the filmmaker's gaze during a close-up caress. "Framing a shot?" In a ruminative mood, Michelangelo Antonioni posits the artist's search as a string of auditions for leading ladies and shifting landscapes, a perpetual merging of the chic and the raw. Country villas sink on hollow ground, surroundings disappear altogether to force lovers to face each other. (The famous fog-drenched road is rhymed with a gray and pink Venetian lagoon, voids vaporous and liquid. "Bellissimo... ma triste.") The young declare themselves incapable of love, lesbianism is an alternative ("a sort of anti-male protest") but masturbation is still preferred. The goon in the ice-cream parlor, the romantic life of terrorists, Lulu's picture on rain-speckled glass. An architect's mellow testament, in which the geometry of a corkscrew staircase bleeds into the wounded emotions of amanti in separate floors. "You Italian directors seem to be paid to be angry at the world." "And laugh at it, too." The conclusion caps the rejoinder to 8½ and settles matters with Spielberg and Lucas, rising to the challenge of imbuing a chintzy special-effect with sublimity. Cinematography by Carlo Di Palma. With Lara Wendel, Veronica Lazar, Enrica Antonioni, Sandra Monteleoni, Marcel Bozzuffi, Giampaolo Saccarola, and Dado Ruspoli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |