Friday, July 17, 2020

La signora senza camelie (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)


Michelangelo Antonioni’s La signora senza camelie immerses us immediately into modern-day myth – a young woman (Lucia Bose), discovered while working in a fabric store, becomes a star with her first movie, long before she has any sense of herself as an actress, or even as a woman. She allows the momentum to sweep her into marrying one of the film's producers, mainly because that's what he decides, and then into his unsuitable remake of Joan of Arc, a flop which immediately kills any sense of her (among industry and public alike) as much more than a pretty face. Summarized that way, the film may not sound much like Antonioni, and indeed the depiction of the filmmaking milieu (including some delicious looks at the filming of a cheesy sand and sandals flick) provides less exacting pleasures than we expect of him. But the film’s ultimate narrative and thematic architecture, built on bitterly ironic personal defeat, is entirely his. After a period of withdrawal and attempted growth, she suddenly realizes (while wandering among a desolate-seeming group of extras in Cinecitta Studio) that it’s all hopeless, and impulsively decides to embrace in all its superficiality the identity that the world seems to desire for her, accepting a superficial role that she’d previously turned down and even deciding to accept the ongoing advances of a man she'd also rejected, knowing the limits of his interest in her. In the final shot she poses for a celebratory group photograph – the photographer asks for a smile and she smiles, perfectly and chillingly, at once a star and a cadavre. The later Antonioni would no doubt have extended the sense of ambiguity and alienation in more complexly intuitive directions, but the sense of a director finding his fullest self is entirely apposite to the film’s theme; by the same token, it’s not necessarily a weakness that Bose doesn’t convey the emotional grandeur of Monica Vitti in the great works to come.

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