Word: vitti
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately there is more to Affair than Ritchie's delicious documentary footage. The backbone of the film is a fictional liaison between Hal (Keith Carradine), a precious young independent director, and Maria (Monica Vitti), a married, middle-aged movie star. When this odd couple first start fooling around there are some amusing cross-cultural jokes, as well as touching erotic interludes in dreamy Riviera locales. But the affair quickly becomes a high-toned soap opera that devours the movie. By the end, the hero and heroine are adrift at sea in a stalled motorboat, screaming platitudes at each other...
Banality aside, the love story suffers from Carradine's performance. Once more he is playing the corruptible innocent he already created in Nashville and Pretty Baby. This humorless characterization has calcified: instead of being boyishly naive, Carradine is just pompous and prim. Certainly he is no match for Vitti, who has rarely seemed as radiant and emotionally full-blooded as she is here. With smoky eyes and a voice to match, she reduces her co-star to the stature...
...Vitti's wronged husband, a flamboyant but sympathetic producer, Raf Vallone is so appealing that it is hard to know why Vitti would forsake him. Whether he is arguing on the phone about Burmese distribution rights or comforting his wife in a time of need, the serpentine Vallone is a grand old charmer. We want to see more of him, but once Affair shifts from satire to bathos he fades away. There are too many such missed opportunities. Like other visitors to Cannes, Michael Ritchie arrived with good intentions, only to get so distracted that he forgot...
...Zabriskie Point structurally (and wisely) resembles Eclipse more than Blow-Up. Probably fearful of juggling both American Youth and radical advances in construction and style, Antonioni returns to a familiar formula: the people are cipher-like, of less consequence to the film than Hemmings in Blow-Up or Monica Vitti in Red Desert. and are often unsecing guidse through elusive situations in abstract environments. Also, we can parallel the student strike footage with the stock market scene in Eclipse: like the earlier film, Zabriskie Point balances personal travelogue with formally spectacular set pieces. The scenes of Daria driving through...