Word: antonioni
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...Antonioni has created a brilliantly coherent study of a girl trying to orient herself in a circle of friends who range from the comparatively normal to the very unstable. Claudia (Monica Vitti) is an emotional, rich, over-sexed, unattached blonde Italian bombshell who maintains a strange integrity even while entering an affair with her closest friend's fiance...
...moment he makes a pass at Claudia--a few hours after Claudia has fallen quite hopelessly in love with him, the film waits upon his comings and goings. He is the least human character in the film, and easily the least attractive, yet his obnoxiously simple character is also Antonioni's indirect way of saying there is nothing rational in Claudia's growing obsession...
Sandro is discounted by Antonioni's contempt; Anna disappears; Antonioni never gives much attention to either the featherbrained Julia or the calm Patrizia. Only Claudia is left. And because she alone remains at the end of the film, the audience must wonder if the story is only that the slob has caught another chick. In the despairing La Dolce Vita, this would be the message. But the distinctive characteristic of L'Avventura is that things are not the same at the end as they were in the beginning. Claudia has changed, as has Anna (if she lives), as has Julia...
...AVVENTURA. The year's finest film, possibly a great one: Michelangelo Antonioni looks long and carefully, as if through a microscope, at the life of a lecher, at "the sickness unto death, which is despair...
...DOLCE VITA. The year's most scandalous success: an always vulgar, sometimes powerful Italian movie in which Director Federico Fellini says what Antonioni says so much better...