MUBI

Antonioni’s first color film, and the last of his famed Monica Vitti ’60’s cycle, this stark, beautifully composed rumination on isolation, loneliness, alienation, madness, science, technology, morality, and the psychological and physical effects of industrial environmental and noise pollution, serves as the director’s bridge between the stark modernism of “L’avventura” and the hip post-modernism of “Blow Up” and “The Passenger”. Vitti, stunning as always in dusty brown hair and designer clothes, plays the wife of a rich shipping magnate, whose environment consists of gigantic factories billowing with steam, mist, and yellow sludge; she’s isolated beneath all of this massive pollution with barely anything to hold on to, and a recent accident has her already struggling mind swarmed with paranoia and fright. She is a bundle of neurosis, a mix between Toshiro Mifune in “I Life in Fear” and Julianne Moore in “Safe”, and Antonioni uses color (going as far as to paint apples and grass ash gray for the effect) as well as landscape to suggest this woman’s loss of her self; it’s all very disturbing, but also extremely beautiful, a dichotomy that the director celebrates unabashedly.