Cronaca di un amore
Michelangelo Antonioni (1950)
Antonioni’s first feature adumbrates his – and others’ – later work in a number of ways. The film is set in and around post-war Milan in winter. The god-forsaken landscapes and streetscapes are used principally as physical context whereas, in the director’s best-known work, the settings are reflections of the characters’ inner worlds. What’s interesting is that these images have greater expressive force here, when they are put at the service of the noir-ish plot. The element that draws attention to itself in Cronaca di un amore is the leading lady’s wardrobe of gowns and furs. In an unusual – and, given the film’s subject, amusingly symbolic – doubling up of responsibilities, the actor who plays her rich industrialist husband (Ferdinando Sarmi) is also the costume designer. Cronaca is about the past, present and lack of future of the relationship between a thirtyish couple, Paola and Guido. Their liaison of some years back was broken off by the death of Paola’s best friend, who was also Guido’s fiancée – a death which Paola and Guido didn’t cause but could have prevented. The film builds to a plot by the lovers to murder Paola’s husband, who has hired a private detective to watch her. When the husband dies – although Paola and Guido again fall short of direct responsibility – the guilt of what they wanted to happen severs their affair once more.
The schematic storyline is nourished by Massimo Girotti’s performance: as Guido, he suggests a sustained ambivalence about the relationship with Paola – and a man whose desires for Paola and to extricate himself from their liaison are closely matched competitors. (The associations that Girotti brings from later films allow his Guido, in retrospect, to anticipate other irresolute protagonists of European film in the later 1950s and beyond.) As Paola, the beautiful Lucia Bosè is a superlative clothes-horse but an inexpressive interpreter of character. The plot and the themes of Cronaca heavily influenced the Spanish film Death of a Cyclist, made only five years later by Juan Antonio Bardem and with Bosè reprising (no more convincingly than here) the femme fatale role.
26 May 2008
