Antonioni, Michelangelo

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    ‘Il Grido’: Love and Loss in Italy’s Po River Valley

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    Long overshadowed by Michelangelo Antonioni’s later work, this feature, newly restored, is being revived at Film Forum, complete with once-censored scenes.Michelangelo Antonioni confounded the 1960 Cannes Film Festival with “L’Avventura,” but that high-modernist missing-person mystery did not emerge from a void. Three years before, the Italian master took the top prize at the Locarno festival with a scarcely less radical film, the existential love-story “Il Grido” (The Cry).Long overshadowed by Antonioni’s later work, “Il Grido” gets a rare revival run at Film Forum in a new restoration, complete with several once-censored scenes.Bracketed by the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy tarantella, “Il Grido” tracks the circular journey of the skilled factory worker Aldo (the rugged American actor Steve Cochran) who, rejected by his longtime common-law wife, Irma (Alida Valli), wanders heartbroken through northern Italy’s Po Valley.Aldo, initially accompanied by his 6-year-old daughter Rosina (Mirna Girardi), takes a few odd jobs and hooks up with several women. A not unattractive if glowering hunk, he first drops in on the fiancée he had jilted (the blacklisted American actress Betsy Blair) only to depart the next morning. Stuck in a nowheresville gas station, he briefly takes up with the proprietress, Virginia (Dorian Gray, her voice dubbed by Antonioni’s muse, Monica Vitti), a lusty widow with an alcoholic father.To please Virginia, Aldo sends Rosina home on a bus, but then takes off himself, eventually stumbling upon a vivacious prostitute, Andreina (the British actress Jacqueline Jones, under the name Lyn Shaw) who works an impoverished stretch of the river. Their brief liaison is less than satisfactory for both. Walking with her by the Po, Aldo starts explaining how he met Irma and lapses into confused silence. “What kind of story is that?” Andreina demands.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In ‘White Lotus,’ Beauty and Truth Are All Mixed Up

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      This season focuses on the willful delusion of the wealthy — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.Early in the second season of “The White Lotus” — Mike White’s HBO satire of the leisure class, currently set in a five-star Sicilian resort — there’s a sequence that offers an overt, shot-for-shot homage to a scene in “L’Avventura,” from 1960, the first film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Trilogy of Decadence.” Coolly removed and virtually plotless, Antonioni’s three films were intended as an indictment of the entropic passivity of wealth. All starred Monica Vitti, the glamorous Italian actress with whom Antonioni was romantically involved. In “L’Avventura,” she plays Claudia, a young woman whose best friend, Anna, disappears during a yacht trip off the coast of Sicily. As Claudia and Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro, search for the missing girl, they drift into an unconvincing relationship. When they arrive at the lone hotel in the town of Noto, Claudia, suddenly worried about facing her friend, tells Sandro to search inside without her.What we are looking at is the experience of being looked at.The scene “The White Lotus” recreates takes place outside, in the piazza, where Claudia is accosted by a horde of leering men. The aesthetics are disconcerting: Antonioni uses the town’s baroque architecture to pile men around and atop Claudia. She looks afraid, for a moment, but then has a sort of detachment from reality. Walking slowly through the crowd, she seems to give herself over to the experience, allowing herself to become a spectacle, subject to the men’s (and the audience’s) scrutinizing, consuming gaze.Welcoming You Back to ‘The White Lotus’The second season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s incisive satire of privilege set in a luxury resort, begins on HBO on Oct. 30.Michael Imperioli: The “Sopranos” star is enjoying a professional renaissance after years of procedurals and indies. In the new season of “The White Lotus” he tries his hand at comedy.Season 1: The series scrutinized the interactions between guests and staff at a resort in Hawaii. “It’s vicious and a little sudsy and then, out of nowhere, sneakily uplifting,” our critic wroteUnaware Villain: The actor Jake Lacy plays Shane, a wealthy and entitled 30-year-old on his honeymoon, in the first season. Here is what he said about bringing to life the unsavory character.Emmys: The series scooped up five Primetime Emmys on Sept. 12, including for best TV movie, limited or anthology series, and best supporting actress for Jennifer Coolidge’s breakout performance.Even before “The White Lotus” fully replicates this image, though, we see one character — a batty gazillionaire named Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge — explicitly name-check Vitti. Describing her fantasy of a day in Italy to her husband, Greg, she stays resolutely on the surface: “First, I want to look just like Monica Vitti,” she says. “And then this man in a very slim-fitting suit, he comes over and he lights my cigarette. And it tastes really good. And then he takes me for a drive on his Vespa. Then, at sunset, we go down really close to the sea, to one of those really romantic spots. And then we drink lots of aperitivos and we eat big plates of pasta with giant clams. And we’re just really chic and happy. And we’re beautiful.” Greg obligingly rents a Vespa. But Tanya is not the character who will feature in the Antonioni homage.“L’Avventura” is not the only film referenced in “The White Lotus,” which is positively haunted by movies and the fantasies they engender. As Tanya casts herself in her superficial version of an Italian film, Bert Di Grasso — a grandfather whose family trip to Sicily has been upended by the women in the family’s refusing to come — is exalting the ethos of “The Godfather,” in which he sees men who are free to do as they like. After her ill-fated Vitti cosplay leaves her alone and betrayed, Tanya takes up with Quentin, part of a group of “high-end gays,” as she calls them, who recast her as a tragic heroine. Quentin tells her about his own lost love, but it sounds like the plot of “Brokeback Mountain,” and he takes her to the opera to see “Madama Butterfly,” which, in this context, can’t help but call to mind “M. Butterfly,” and a very specific form of romantic deception. As the line blurs between stories and lies, the vibe shifts closer to “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” If the first season of “The White Lotus” was about the casual destructiveness of wealth, this one seems to be about its willful delusion — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.In Antonioni’s film, Vitti’s wealth and beauty grant her character access to a world of glamour, but they also trap her in a lie, concealing a real world of rot and corruption. “L’Avventura” means “the adventure” — ironic, since nothing much happens in the movie, and its central mystery is never solved — but an “avventura” is also a term for an illicit affair, often one entered out of boredom, for kicks. This is precisely how everyone in this season of “The White Lotus” gets into trouble. For both show and film, “love” is a dance of deception and self-delusion, in which it’s hard to tell who’s the mark.The only character who still clings to purity — the only innocent left to corrupt — is Harper Spiller, played by Aubrey Plaza. And she is the one who ends up in Noto, recreating the Monica Vitti scene in the piazza. Like Claudia, Harper has drifted here by accident — by virtue, another character observes, of being pretty. The newly rich wife of a tech founder, she has come on a luxury vacation at the invitation of his college roommate. Harper is suspicious of the whole endeavor: of getting rich quickly, of old friends who materialize suddenly after you get rich, of rich people who spend their lives disengaging from the world and drifting from one fantasy locale to the next. In Noto, she finds herself alone and surrounded by men, exactly like Vitti. Just as in the film, the scene feels over the top and surreal — part paranoid fantasy, part dissociative experience, and even stranger now that it’s 2022, not 1960, and Aubrey Plaza doesn’t cut quite so otherworldly and surprising (for Noto) a figure as the statuesque blonde Vitti did.As we watch Harper drift through the crowd, what we are looking at is the experience of being looked at. Along with Tanya — who aims to imitate Vitti but is instead brutally compared, by a tactless hotel manager, to Peppa Pig — she offers a metaphor for how thoroughly we can give ourselves over to imposture.Antonioni started working during the Italian neorealism movement, when films were shot on location, making use of nonactors, telling stories about working-class people and poverty and despair. But it was “L’Avventura,” with its focus on the alienation of the moneyed, that made him internationally famous. I know this because I took an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year abroad in Paris, and — not surprisingly, I suppose, for the kind of person who takes an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year in Paris — I, too, preferred Antonioni’s trilogy about disaffected rich people to the stuff that had come before: children stealing bicycles, Anna Magnani worrying about unpaid bills, that sort of thing. Struggle is hard to watch; it is much more pleasant to have our moral judgments projected into a world of aestheticized, escapist pleasure.We carry a desire to inhabit images we’ve seen, reified symbols of love, glamour, happiness, success. The “White Lotus” scene in Noto is a perfect representation of this recursive fakery and its nightmarish endpoint. Like so many travelers in the Instagram age, the show’s characters drift through their adventures without any real purpose other than to reproduce the pretty scenes and special moments they’ve seen elsewhere, trying to locate themselves in endless reflections. Among them, it is only Harper who remains unaffected by visual culture. Her scene in Noto feels like an inflection point. It is easier than ever to mistake beauty for truth — or pretend to. Which, the show asks, will Harper choose?Source photographs: HBO; Cino del Duca/PCE, Lyre. More

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      in Movies

      Clare Peploe, Film Director Who Jumbled Genres, Dies at 79

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      She contributed to the movies of her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, but occasionally made her own, including “Triumph of Love.”Clare Peploe, a director and screenwriter who liked to merge genres in her own films, and who also made significant contributions to some of the movies of her husband, the celebrated filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, died on June 24 in Rome. She was 79.The cause was cancer, said Alessandra Bracaglia, her assistant.As a director, Ms. Peploe made a quick impact with her first effort, a comic short called “Couples and Robbers,” about newlyweds who commit a robbery, which she wrote with Ernie Eban; it was nominated for the short-subject Oscar in 1981.“In this comedy-thriller she has demonstrated that in her very first film she is a talent to be reckoned with,” Richard Roud wrote in The Guardian Weekly when the film played at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982. “The casting and direction of actors is superb. If someone doesn’t finance a feature film by her, it will be a great shame.”Ms. Peploe, though, found financing to be a struggle, especially since her films defied easy categorization, and when she did set a project in motion, she worked at a deliberate pace. As a result, her oeuvre was limited. Her first feature, “High Season,” wasn’t released until 1987, and there would be only two others, “Rough Magic” in 1995 and “Triumph of Love” in 2001.She had a knack for attracting well-known actors to her projects. “High Season,” a comic indictment of gauche tourists, starred Jacqueline Bisset, Irene Papas and Kenneth Branagh, among others. “Rough Magic” featured Bridget Fonda as a magician’s assistant on the run in Mexico and Russell Crowe as a man hired to track her down.“Triumph of Love,” her most well-received feature, was her take on an 18th-century stage comedy by Pierre de Marivaux and had a cast that included Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley, Fiona Shaw and Rachael Stirling.Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in a scene from “Triumph of Love,” Ms. Peploe’s most well-received feature.Sundance ChannelAll these films were hard to pigeonhole. “High Season” was both a commentary on what tourism does to an ancient Greek village and a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-style romantic fantasy. “Rough Magic,” The Independent of Britain said, “veers from Saturday morning serial-style thrills to Buñuelian surrealism to light noir, with dashes of Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks here and there.”“Clare Peploe’s films as director are distinguished by an uncommon combination of madcap narrative intricacy, sophisticated battles of the sexes, picturesque locations and artistic self-consciousness,” Susan Felleman, a professor of art history and film and media studies at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design, said by email. “They’re screwball comedies for the art-house set.”When she wasn’t directing films, Ms. Peploe was sometimes writing them. Her first film credit was as one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about rebellious American youths, “Zabriskie Point” (1970), although she played down her contribution, describing her role as “the umpteenth assistant” on the film.“I wasn’t really a writer on it, I was a researcher on it,” she said. (She was useful because she was fluent in English.) She shared screenwriting credit on Mr. Bertolucci’s films “Luna” in 1979 and “Besieged” in 1998.When she was directing, though, she generally banned her famous husband from the set.“He makes people nervous,” she told The Independent in 1996.Clare Frances Katherine Peploe was born on Oct. 20, 1941, in Tanga, in northeastern Tanzania. Her father, William, was a British civil servant who became an art dealer and director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, and her mother, Clotilde (Brewster) Peploe, was an artist.She had an exotic early life: growing up and attending schools in Kenya, London, Italy and Paris, picking up several languages and acquiring a worldly outlook. Living in a variety of cultures, she told The Record of New Jersey in 1997, “you learn to see everything — an historical event, a war, a wedding ceremony, whatever — in so many different ways.”Ms. Peploe in 2001 with her husband, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. She made significant contributions to a number of his movies.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe met Mr. Antonioni in the late 1960s and worked with him on “Zabriskie Point.” She first met Mr. Bertolucci in 1970 at a screening of his film “The Spider’s Stratagem,” and they met several times afterward, bonding over their shared love of Jean-Luc Godard. She served as a second assistant director on “1900,” Mr. Bertolucci’s 1976 drama of class struggle, and before the end of the decade they had married.Ms. Peploe said that, counterintuitively, being associated with her husband didn’t help her with the nuts-and-bolts aspects of her own filmmaking like obtaining financing.“In fact,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1988, “I recently realized that many of the problems I encountered had to do with being married to him. I naïvely assumed that people didn’t care about that sort of thing and just saw me as being me, but I now see there’s a certain envy you encounter, an attitude of ‘she doesn’t need our help — look who she’s married to.’”Creatively, however, they complemented each other, she said.“Over the years Bernardo often asked me to help him with ideas for his films, and I always surprised myself with the cinematic, Bertolucci-like ideas I’d come up with,” she said. “He had a sort of Svengali effect on me and has been instrumental in helping me come into my own as a filmmaker.”Mr. Bertolucci died in 2018. Ms. Peploe, who lived in Rome, is survived by a brother, Mark Peploe, who shared a screenwriting Oscar with Mr. Bertolucci for the 1987 film “The Last Emperor.” More