"Cronaca di un amore ," the title of the first (1950) feature film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, who died last week at the age of 94, should be "Chronicle of a Love" rather than "Chronicle of a Love Affair," because it centers on the love of both the lovers' lives. Insofar as it is an affair, it is a passion revived by the rich Milan industrialist husband, Enrico Fontana (Ferdinando Sarmi) who has raised a pretty girl from Ferrara, Paola Molon Fontana (Lucia Bosê) into the social elite.

Made jealous by seeing photos of his wife before he met and married her, at the start of the movie he has hired detectives to find out about her past, something he failed to do before wooing and marrying her. There is a Dark Secret in her past and the man she loved back in Ferrara, Guido (Massimo Girotti). Guido is alerted by the third of the female musketeers of Paola's youth that someone is making inquiries (the detective played by Gino Rossi encounters no suspicion of strangers; indeed those he questions are remarkably eager to talk). He goes to Milan to warn her.

Thus, the not at all subtle irony is that the husband's jealousy directly occasions a cause for jealousy that did not exist before the inquiries--or at least was dormant. Once Paola and Guido meet again, she starts throwing herself at him, and the last third of the story is in noir country, including a fancy staircase and nocturnal stakeouts.

At a time in which Hollywood's Production Code did not allow double beds to be shown even in bedrooms occupied by married couples, the bedroom scenes in "Cronaca" may have seemed bold, even with no simulated intercourse or any nudity. But that Guido and Paola are having sex is unmistakable.

Lucia Bosê received star-lighting and an elaborate wardrobe (including some really silly hats!), but she was no Sophia Loren, nor even an Alida Valli or Hedy Lamarr (she bore some resemblance to Lamarr, or perhaps just to the pearls Lamarr wore in "Algiers" and other movies).

And Massimo Girotti was no Marcello Mastroianni or Vittorio Gassman. He managed more fervor in Visconti's version of The Postman Always Rings Twice (Ossessione, 1943) and went on to play the industrialist father in the family Terrence Stamp disrupts in Pasolini's "Teorema" (1968) and King Kresus in Pasolini's "Medea" (1969). I was not very impressed by him as Guido, however.

As the husband, nonactor Ferdinando Sarmi was just fine. Insofar as anyone stands out from Antonioni's freshman effort it is cinematographer Enzo Serafin (who went on to lens "Signora senza camelie" for Antonioni in 1953 and "Viaggio in Italia" for Roberto Rossellini in 1954). The featurette on restoration that is the DVD's only bonus feature shows how much had to be done to recover the images Serafin shot. The blacks are black and the interiors have many gradations between black and white. There are many striking compositions and unusual (for that era) camera fluidity. (It often follows the restless characters, often from above them.)

The sound may have been restored, but as one of those who worked on it remarks in the restoration featurette, a much higher noise to dialogue ratio was accepted in Italy in 1950. Moreover, the solo saxophone moaning on the music score seems to me to drown out some of the lines (though I was reading them than trying to understand the rapid-fire northern Italian dialogue).

There are five screen-writing credits (including one for Antonioni) and the dialogue seems the humdrum product of a committee that did not include anyone good at snappy dialogue. The movie is very talky--which is even more noticeable knowing the muteness of later Antonioni films (and for the last quarter century of his life, his own).

There is a plot, a very familiar one of the younger, bored wife of an older man who is away making money most of the time. The hollowness of "high society" has frequently been shown (in part as a balm to those without the funds to see for themselves...), and especially in Antonioni alienation-drenched films.

In watching Antonioni films from before "L'Avventura" (1961) as a prelude for rewatching the films that were international art-house favorites (or at least conversation pieces...). I'm trying to see Antonioni's allegiance to communism. I realize that there was an Italian tradition of Gramscian cultural critique and that communists were the opposition to fascism (which was in power in Italy more than a decade earlier than in Germany), but the fascination with how the rich lived (couture, coiffure, interior decoration, cars, etc.) of Antonioni and Visconti (a red baron) do not fit well with allegiance to the communism centralized in the Kremlin (which did not end with Stalin's death in 1953). The arriviste (Paola) and would-be arriviste (Guido) in "Cronaca" are no more likable than the already established elite in the movie--and Enrico is more likable than Paola (not least in being a producer rather than a particularly vapid and tasteless consumer).

The emptiness and alienation from feelings of any sort at the socioeconmic top is a theme running through Antonioni's oeuvre, but if he had tried to work in the Soviet Union, he would have been denounced as a "formalist." Unlike Visconti (or the anti-communist De Sica), there is nothing meeting the demands of "socialist realism" in Antonioni's oeuvre. And surely, as focused on cinema as he was, Antonioni had to know that his aesthetics was anathema to the Soviet cultural commissars. (No doubt, I'll return to this puzzlement in my Antonioni retrospective.)

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© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

I don't know whay L'amiche is considered Antonioni's first major film (other than being based on a novella by Cesare Pavese). The empty lives, egocetnricity, and viciousness of its characters seems to me more than foreshadowed in "Cronaca di Amor." Antonioni's best-known (and IMO best) film, Blow-Up also has characters with empty lives and unconcern for others, though only the one played by Vanessa Redgrave seems to belong to the "upper crust" of mid-1960s "swinging London." (The character Redgrave plays has other resemblances to Paola, too.)

Scenes along the water (whether riverbanks or ocean beaches) are common in Antonioini films. In that San Francisco has a number of 1950s trolleys from Milan running (the F-line), I enjoyed seeing them (not that Paola ever set foot on one!: they go by).




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