☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Il Grido (1957) -- M. Antonioni
Who would make a movie
like this other than Antonioni? Yet,
even having seen most of his later features, I wasn't prepared for the
encroaching inevitability of the plot's finale.
Steve Cochran (American noir star) plays a guy whose longtime companion
(Alida Valli) suddenly up and leaves him.
So, he takes his 5 year old daughter on the road with him, across the barren
wintry fields of the Po Valley. He
occasionally shacks up with the women he meets, who often have their own
problems that he doesn't want to take on.
He's lost, sad, unsure of what he's looking for, unable to commit to
anything (a job, a relationship), and unable to return to the past. Antonioni's
early film is stark but beautiful in many ways with strong echoes of Visconti's
Ossessione (and other neo-realist films) but this director is unable to escape
the gravitational pull of the alienation that would later dominate his oeuvre.
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