Word: vitti
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...remarkable opening sequence, the film states its entire problem and much of its plot in one awesome metaphor: a young woman in green (Monica Vitti) stands staring desolately across acres of black sludge. Obviously in a state of shock, she has recently attempted suicide following a minor auto accident. But there is no comfort to be had, for here within walking distance of Dante's tomb sprawls a 20th century Inferno. Above her, towering smokestacks throw flame into the sky, while the pipelines of industrial Ravenna belch steam onto the wasted earth...
...hiding my Jeep," bellows the lord of the manor, Curt Jurgens. To please his eccentric sister, he dresses in period costume and banishes all evidence of the 20th century from the family's isolated ancestral estate in the Swedish lake country. Jurgens' second wife is Monica Vitti, a sultry charmer who enjoys a casually incestuous relationship with her brother Sébastien (Jean-Claude Brialy) and soon begins cooing with Cousin Eric (Jean-Louis Trintignant...
Clearly, Château cannot stand on its plot alone. But Vadim goes farther to bring it to sure ruin by translating high comedy into languid boudoir farce. Time and again he sacrifices wit, worldliness and style to make room for a blonde (Vitti) in a bed sheet-the Vadim trademark-then repeats the obligatory routine with a brunette (Hardy). What he conveys, at last, is a boyish conviction that these bored, civilized votaries of pleasure might be just the sort for a fun weekend, but no longer. Sagan's sidelong glance at the enigma of women, in Vadim...
This self-consciousness keeps him from expressing gracefully any emotions he might actually feel and also from understanding anyone else's feelings. Vittoria (Monica Vitti) brings him to her mother's house and makes an innocent joke: she lies on her old bed--now much too short--and laughs gaily. Piero makes an ill-timed and unsuccessful pass at her and destroys her pleasure...
...extraordinary effort of style, as a definitive treatment of the themes Antonioni developed in L'Avventura and La Notte. As in those films, he employs the method of tedium to explain the nature of tedium, but he employs it so skillfully now that boredom is seldom boring. Vitti, as always, is endlessly fascinating, a luminous mannequin clothed with Antonioni's projections. And Delon is appropriately repulsive as a young man in a hurry. In the scenes at the stock exchange, Antonioni finds his brokers, as Auden found them, "roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse...