Word: claudia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...women who surround Claudia are made real partly through painting extreme characteristics that are easily sustained. But the interplay which fills the plot makes some extremes much more plausible: Claudia's friend Anna, who is engaged to Sandro, has an apparently neurotic desire to get away from him, even though he attracts her, but after two hours of Sandro's behavior it is entirely clear that there is nothing unreasonable about her wish...
Sandro, a rich contract estimator who mouths dreams of the creator he might have been, dominates the film--not as a person, but as an impulsive bundle of sex-oriented sex appeal. From the 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...
...there is a peculiar logic to the story, which finds expression in Claudia's changing attitude--distress at Anna's disappearance, shock at Sandro's advances, attraction to Sandro, shame at her behavior, and finally an unreasoned love in which her shame is slowly lost...
...tradesy eye on his congregation, Dino is going to make the film in English, dubbing it in Italian. Who will the actors be? "Everybody," says Dino. It is easy to imagine Van Johnson munching an apple offered him by Anita Ekberg, Frank Sinatra slinging stones at Jackie Gleason, Claudia Cardinale holding Laurence Olivier's head on a platter. No one has actually been cast yet, but two are all but certain to appear: Anthony Quinn, who has done some of his best work in De Laurentiis films (La Strada), and beautiful, languorous Silvana Mangano, who married Dino soon after...