Michelangelo Antonioni
Il grido

The Cry is considered one of the most important films of Michelangelo Antonioni, for some it is his masterpiece.

It is also regarded as one of the most important films of Italian cinema in the 1950s.

In the cold and foggy countryside of Ferrara, Irma (Alida Valli) confesses to Aldo (Steve Cochran) that she wants to leave him, as she loves another.

Irma, whose husband has been in Australia for work for 7 years, had gotten involved with Aldo, a worker, and they even had a child together… But Irma has now learned that her husband died down there and decides to reveal to Aldo her affair with another, even though she has been seeing him for just a few months… and anyway, she tells Aldo she no longer loves him.

It's over.

Just like that, without any warning, without any portent.

Aldo goes out of his mind…

For him, who will take the child with him, it will be a rambling and ranting wandering around the surrounding areas, in search of a job, of a new woman to love… but everything seems useless, he doesn't even believe it himself…

Beautifully photographed, the barren, arid, and foggy landscape is the perfect backdrop for the mood of this lost man and the child, poor innocent creature, who will have to follow her father everywhere… The surrounding fog, the deserted and arid countryside almost seem to say there's nothing and no one here that can help you…

The soundtrack (Giovanni Fusco) is no less. Strange, solemn, and distorted melodies serve as a counterpoint to the film's sequences. When we think of the music of Italian films of those times, pompous “ancient” and tear-jerking, we're really on another planet.

All this to say that Antonioni is one of the few modern directors of the time. He deals with the “simple” end of a relationship in an analytical way, trying to delve as deeply as possible into the human soul and psyche. In this sense, there are some analogies to the superb Possession by Zulawski, which I've reviewed and which would come about twenty years later.

And yet.

And yet I watched the film, I didn't experience it, indeed… because Antonioni, in my opinion, is undoubtedly an excellent director regarding shooting techniques, cinematography, soundtrack, etc., but he doesn't know how to tell a story.

The film consists of sequences that are disconnected from each other, like small theatrical acts, and even Aldo, the absolute protagonist, didn't always convince me.

However, this is a personal judgment because, as I said at the beginning, the film is considered an absolute MAS-TER-PIECE.

Without a doubt a must-see, a heavy stone yes yes.

But I take away a star, I do.