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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