Word: claudia
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Antioni 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, oversexed, 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. 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 Anna has inexplicably disappeared--to the time when 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 less attractive, yet his obnoxiously simple character is also Antioni's indirect way of saying there is nothing...
...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...
...eternal youth, of the doomed and beautiful son-lover of the legends. Actress Cardinale seems almost ludicrously crude by comparison. But her faults are not all her fault. Director Valeric Zurlini, a well-known cheesecake vendor, incessantly interrupts the subtle drama of the script to turn his lens on Claudia's chest. He obviously intends the show to be a bust. And so, in the last analysis...