Word: sandro
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...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...
Suddenly a storm comes up. The party has to leave the island. Where is Anna? They call. She does not answer. They ransack the island. She has vanished. Is she dead? Did she run away? The yacht heads back to port, leaving Sandro and Claudia to continue the search...
Part Two, says Antonioni, "seems to describe how a person is searched for. but it really describes how she is forgotten." Anxious, guilty, deeply unsettled and finally exhausted. Sandro looks to Claudia for-comfort? oblivion? sex? It's all the same to Sandro. He is one of those men who, at the least sign of strain or difficulty, reach for a woman the way other men reach for a cigarette. Claudia resists, but when the search takes Sandro to the mainland, she goes along, and the inevitable happens. At first they prosecute the search with determination, but as they...
Part Three moves slowly, relentlessly, as a bulldozer might move an Everest of farina, into the character of Sandro. What is wrong with him? He only knows that he has sold his creative talent for commercial success. On and on and on he goes, looking but not really looking for Anna, avoiding the truth about himself, escaping into sex with Claudia as once he had escaped with Anna and the devil knows how many others; a man turning eternally in the limbo of a living death-and apparently enjoying it. Suddenly it occurs to the spectator that Anna will never...