Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.
Antonioni's first colour film is a landmark of world cinema. The plot is deliberately thin and elliptical — emotional drift rather than narrative drive — but this is a feature, not a flaw, of Antonioni's method; it still earns only a modest score as pure story construction. Monica Vitti's performance as the alienated, neurotic Giuliana is extraordinary, physically and emotionally inhabiting a woman on the edge of breakdown. The cinematography by Carlo Di Palma under Antonioni's direction is genuinely revolutionary: colour is used expressionistically rather than realistically, with desaturated, poisoned industrial palettes and sudden chromatic intrusions that externalise psychological states — a landmark achievement. Novelty is very high: the film essentially invents a visual language for depicting modern alienation through industrial landscape, and remains entirely singular in its conception. The ending is quietly resonant but not entirely satisfying, offering philosophical observation rather than resolution.