Monica Vitti

  • Michelangelo Antonioni – L’Avventura aka The Adventure (1960)

    1951-1960ArthouseDramaItalyMichelangelo Antonioni
    L'avventura (1960)
    L’avventura (1960)

    Quote:
    This ground-breaking film won a Special Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and established its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, as a major international talent. The plot concerns a yachting trip by a small group of jaded socialites, including Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), an aging architect who sold out for easy money long ago, his mistress Anna (Lea Massari), and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), who doesn’t fit in with the wealthy jet-setters’ dissolute ethics. When Anna disappears during a tour of a volcanic island, Claudia initially blames Sandro’s emotionally barren behavior toward her. As they search the island, however, Claudia and Sandro grow closer and — when it is apparent that Anna is gone forever — become lovers. Unfortunately, Sandro cannot find anything decent inside himself and betrays Claudia with a local prostitute. Caught in the act, Sandro has a heartrending breakdown on a desolate beach, but Claudia silently forgives him. L’avventura caught many audiences who were expecting a mystery by surprise; as in La notte (1961), The Eclipse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), Antonioni is interested less in developing a logical story than in exploring states of feeling and breakdowns in human connection.Read More »

  • Mauro Bolognini, Mario Monicelli, Antonio Pietrangeli, Luciano Salce – Le fate aka The Queens (1966)

    Mauro Bolognini1961-1970Antonio PietrangeliComedyCommedia all'ItalianaItalyLuciano SalceMario Monicelli
    Le fate (1966)
    Le fate (1966)

    Quote:
    The Four Queenly Virtues are Constancy, Fidelity, Chastity and Honor.

    Four unrelated short comedies by four different directors. “Queen Sabina”chronicles the sexual misadventures of a teenage girl on the road home. “Queen Armenia” centers on a self-serving opportunistic gypsy babysitter who uses her employer’s kids for her own gain. The third episode, “Queen Elena” centers on a husband who learns a lesson about the perils of infidelity after he succumbs to the wiles of the seductive wife next door. The last vignette, “Queen Marta” centers on a wealthy woman who, when drunk, uses her butler as an outlet for her lust.Read More »

  • Roger Vadim – Château en Suède aka Nutty, Naughty Chateau (1963)

    1961-1970ArthouseComedyFranceRoger Vadim

    Quote:
    An old castle in Sweden inhabited by a family of 18th-century-costumed eccentrics holds secrets, deception, and rumors of murder.Read More »

  • Joseph Losey – Modesty Blaise (1966)

    1961-1970ComedyCrimeJoseph LoseyUnited Kingdom

    Monica Vitti is Modesty Blaise, fabulous international spy-slash-jewel thief. She is hired by Sir Gerald Terrant (Harry Andrews) of the British government — I think, but I’m not sure, for reasons I’ll explain momentarily — to make sure £50 million in diamonds gets to the proper Middle Eastern sheik in exchange for oil reserves. Modesty warns them that if she is not told the full story about the diamonds and the plans to rob them en route, she will consider herself a free agent and steal the diamonds for herself. Thus begins a strange series of events that are part spy spoof, part random stream of consciousness events, and partly based on the long-running comic strip begun in 1963.Read More »

  • Mario Monicelli – La ragazza con la pistola AKA The Girl with a Pistol (1968)

    1961-1970ComedyCommedia all'ItalianaDramaItalyMario Monicelli

    Girl with a Pistol, directed in 1968 by Mario Monicelli and starring Monica Vitti, Stanley Baker and Carlo Giuffrè, is one of the most successful Italian comedies. Monica Vitti is Assunta, a Sicilian girl seduced and abandoned by Vincenzo (Carlo Giuffrè) who then escapes to London in order to avoid a shotgun wedding. Assunta’s only chance to restore her lost honour is to find and kill her seducer.Read More »

  • Miklós Jancsó – La pacifista – Smetti di piovere AKA The Pacifist (1970)

    1961-1970ArthouseItalyMiklós JancsóPolitics

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    This highly symbolic and enigmatic political drama by Hungarian director Miklos Jancso was produced by a consortium from Italy, France and West Germany. This film is considered to be an homage to Antonioni as it uses his favorite leading actress (Monica Vitti) and his cameraman Carlo di Palma. This film was made during a time when Jancso was not allowed to make films in his native Hungary. In the middle of the crowd, while covering an Italian political protest by leftists, The Journalist (Monica Vitti), a pacifist, finds herself surrounded by a quite different group of people who jostle her, remove her recording equipment from her and set her car on fire. She complains to the police about this. However, when the police bring one of the young men before her for her to identify him, she says he is not one of her attackers. This leads to her having a romantic relationship with the young man. The group, and the young man, are young Italian neo-fascists, and the young man has been given the job of assassinating a leftist. He is too gentle to do this, and his group kills him right before The Journalist’s eyes. She goes to the police again, but they begin to believe that she is insane, even when she is forced to kill her boyfriend’s assailants right there in the police station.Read More »

  • Michelangelo Antonioni – L’Avventura (1960)

    Drama1951-1960ArthouseItalyMichelangelo Antonioni

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader wrote:

    The controversial, highly charged 1960 masterpiece that put Michelangelo Antonioni’s name on the international map. It’s a work that requires some patience–a 145-minute mystery that strategically elides any conventional denouement–but more than amply repays the effort. The ambiguous title adventure begins on a luxury pleasure cruise. The disconsolate girlfriend (Lea Massari) of a successful architect (Gabriele Ferzetti) mysteriously disappears on a remote volcanic island, and the architect and the woman’s best friend (Monica Vitti) set out across Italy looking for her, becoming involved with each other along the way. In the course of their epic travels, Antonioni paints a complex portrait of a crisis in contemporary values and relationships. His stunning compositions and choreographic mise en scene, punctuated by eerie silences and shots that linger expectantly over landscapes, made him a key Italian modernist director of the 50s and 60s, perhaps rivaled only by Rossellini. This haunting work–the first in a loose trilogy completed by La notte and Eclipse–shows him at the summit of his powers.Read More »

  • Michelangelo Antonioni – Il Mistero di Oberwald aka The Oberwald Mystery (1981)

    1981-1990ArthouseExperimentalItalyMichelangelo Antonioni

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    The Passenger (1975) marked the end of Antonioni’s three picture deal with MGM, and simultaneously the end of his mainstream acceptance. Although revered now as one of his finest works, The Passenger had lukewarm reception at best, with most of the American critics still bitter of Antonioni’s caricaturing of American capitalism in Zabriskie Point (1969). Since those two films had been costly flops, Antonioni found himself unable to secure investors for the arthouse pictures he’d become known for. Five years past, and still not a film, until finally Antonioni settled on The Oberwald Mystery.Read More »

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