Vague Visages’ Il Grido essay contains spoilers. Michelangelo Antonion’s 1957 movie features Steve Cochran, Alida Valli and Dorian Gray. Check out more VV film essays at the home page.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s run of 1960s classics have earned him his place in the canon of Big Auteurs. From L’Avventura (1960) onwards, the Italian filmmaker’s style crystalized into rich and absurdly beautiful people wandering around modern urban landscapes, reckoning with the existential emptiness of their lives. In broad terms, Antonioni’s filmmaking’s focus on the bourgeoisie and the nouveau riche of 1960s Italy spoke in part to the country’s “economic miracle”; in two decades after WWII, the country went from a poor, rural economy to a urbanized, consumer goods society with a vastly improved standard of living (or at least this is what it looked like in the country’s north, where most of Antonioni’s films are set –the south remained comparatively much poorer).

The Neorealism that had dominated the critical conversation immediately in Italy after WWII was by the 60s falling out of fashion, with critics and audiences alike tired of depictions of raw poverty. Antonioni had his roots in Neorealism, hanging around the edges of the scene, and his first few features in the early 50s broadly followed the Neorealist pattern: working-class- characters, naturalism front and center, the camera very grounded. It’s this connection which makes Il Grido (The Cry) such a fascinating work in his filmography. For Antonioni, it’s the halfway point between Neorealism and the narrative-free psychological landscapes of alienation which dominate his 60s work. The movie follows Aldo (Steve Cochran), a mechanic who gets dumped by his girlfriend, Irma (Alida Valli), after she discovers her long-estranged husband has died abroad. Having to find a way to take care of his young daughter, he finds himself wandering across the Po Valley in northern Italy, drifting between romantic relationships and work.

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There’s old girlfriend Elvia (Betsy Blair), who is initially happy to see Aldo’s return but quickly susses out he’s only returned because there’s nowhere else; there’s gas station owner Virginia (Dorian Gray), who turns out to be a bit too horny and ambitious for Aldo; there’s sex worker Andreina (Lynn Shaw), who seems to fall in with Aldo simply because the two can’t find anyone else. The landscape affects the main protagonist and the supporting characters as much as their own callousness towards each other. There’s barely an exterior shot in which sunlight is visible: the sky is perpetually overcast, the trees never grow so much as a whisp of a leaf and the fog always seems to stick to the roads and slow-moving canals. At one point early on in Il Grido, a character remarks to another that this year’s winter seems endless. Yet the film, which feels like it takes place over a couple of months, and possibly as much as a year, never moves out of wintertime. This temporal detail mimics the depression and alienation that Aldo goes through, where no action he takes seems to re-energize him or give him any warmth.

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In that sense, Aldo is not altogether unlike the protagonists of Antonioni’s later works. The main characters of the so-called “Alienation Trilogy” —  L’Avventura, La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962) — may be rich playboys, successful novelists and bored stockbrokers (the polar opposite of working-class mechanic Aldo), but their worldview is equally shaped by an inability to relate to what’s going on around them, and a sense that not much of what they do can change anything. But the later films leave viewers isolated with their characters — there is little sense that there is anything materially meaningful for them, and Antonioni withholds contact and interaction with the outside world. It makes sense from an interiorist, psychological perspective (these are egotistical, alienated characters), but it also leaves the audience empty. It’s hard to reach in and find anything in the Alienation Trilogy, because the end-point is utter stillness and nothingness — and for what? It is too wrapped up in its own psychological point-of-view to break beyond these confines.

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Il Grido succeeds in comparison because it still has one foot in the Neorealist tradition, where there is still a sociological impulse and desire to showcase what the structure of the world looks like. Viewers are fully aware of the various predicaments that Aldo’s girlfriends find themselves in, whether they’re small business owners, the working class, newly financially liberated or the underclass — they all have their own reasons for taking Aldo in (or rejecting him), each one functioning as an element of a new, rapidly modernizing Italy. If anything, the women are more interesting than Aldo; that Irma receives the inheritance from her dead husband and then decides to immediately dump Aldo (when everyone assumes the two would immediately marry and settle) speaks to an upending of the old social order. In Il Grido’s Italy, not only are women happily having affairs now, they’re dumping men when they’ve no use for them! In a comparatively small role that bookends the film, Valli as Irma gives the film a shot of directness and surety, in a story largely full of characters unsure of what to do with themselves.

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The Po Valley setting links Il Grido back to Neorealism in another way, back to Luchino Visconti’s 1943 film Ossessione, the movie largely regarded as kicking off the movement. An adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, Visconti’s debut film transplants the action to a gas station in the same region, reframing the sordid tale of a wife who conspires with her lover to kill her husband as a story of economic hardship, desire and of kicking back against patriarchal authority. 

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Both Ossessione and Il Grido use the Po Valley as a way of trapping the protagonists, its endless flat sky revealing a prison, where the mud and the water eventually forces one to turn back. And Antonioni is similarly conscious of blocking and framing as Visconti — lots of visual compositions within Il Grido see Aldo trapped by the positioning of characters either side of him. But where Ossessione is a tale of lust and power, of two characters trying to take control of their destiny, Il Grido is empty of lust, desire and any anger whatsoever. 

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It’s a dichotomy deepened by the changes Italy had undergone in the preceding decade-and-a-bit. Visconti debuted at a time when Italy was in the midst of war and Benito Mussolini’s regime was about to topple. Ossessione was, in its own way, a film of resistance, though both Visconti and Antonioni worked at Cinema, a magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son. A huge cinephile and believer in the fascist cause, the irony of Vittorio’s editorship of Cinema is that he ended up with a cabal of antifascist writers who formed the intellectual background of the post-war Italian Neorealism. Alongside the fact that fellow Neorealist directors Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica both got their start in the fascist film industry, there’s a glorious irony to the fact that Mussolini’s investment in cinema gave birth to a film movement which entirely repudiated its values while cannibalizing and appropriating its infrastructure.

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If Ossessione is a film desperately trying to grab onto fate with whatever opportunities are presented, then by the time of Il Grido, Italians did have much more control over their own fate, or certainly the economic opportunity to do so. Yet with this greater opportunity seems to come a paralysis of choice. A character remarks about some recent floods at one point: “it swept away some old things and made room for new ones.” Maybe Aldo is the old thing being referred to: a man who appears to want a traditional family unit with the father as breadwinner but turns away from it. 

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Late in Il Grido, there’s a sleazy businessman who brags about how he made his fortune in Venezuela (the suggestion is that he’s an old fascist who scarpered when Mussolini fell), and strangely enough he’s one of the few characters Aldo seems comfortable around. Is Aldo also an old fascist, unsure of his new role in modern Italy and left wandering? The narrative of fascism is that an unspoilt, organic “species” of people is to take control of their own destiny, through a totalitarian, oppressive government that commands every action. Give a fascist genuine freedom and choice over their actions, and they crumble in the face of it. 

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Il Grido is about a man’s utter inability to comprehend the modern world and adapt to it. The end result is a hopeless, pitiful film, and that’s meant as a compliment.

A 4K restoration of Il Grido screened at Film Forum in New York City from November 8, 2024 to November 21, 2024.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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