Il Grido

The drifter -- the guy who wanders from place to place, clueless but well-meaning, non-malicious, but leaving hurt feelings and broken hearts behind -- is a stock figure in American films and literature.  It is interesting to see a similar character portrayed in an Italian film.

Il Grido (1957) is an early film by the acclaimed Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007).   I watched a showing last night, the first weekly offering of the Seattle Art Museum's Italian film festival.

The film is set in the Po River Valley, a flat, featureless, agricultural region of northern Italy -- still occasionally malarial in the 1950s.  Its tedious landscape was then starting to be disfigured in places  by new industries.  Antonioni's black and white cinematography -- his landscapes often look like stage backdrops -- is further flattened by the perpetual haze of the region.  Haze, not fog, just a blurring of distant objects.

Aldo works at a sugar refinery, and is first seen where he is employed, standing at the top of a tall, phallic, observation tower, the industrial purpose of which is never explained.  Irma, his "girlfriend" drops by to inform him that her husband -- who has been off in Australia for seven years, looking for work -- has been reported deceased.  That's wonderful, Aldo says.  Now we can get married and provide our daughter a family.

Irma doesn't share his enthusiasm.  She admits that she has met someone else, and that she no longer loves Aldo.  Aldo's emotions run from disbelief, to denial, to sorrow, to a decision to "man up."  He slaps her repeatedly in front of villagers, to win her back by showing her who's boss.  "Now it's final," Irma declares.  Aldo leaves town, hitchhiking, taking his daughter with him (with Irma's consent.)

The acting -- especially for a 1957 film -- seems melodramatic, reminiscent of soap opera or even silent film.  I'm no expert on Italian directors, however, and Antonioni may have had artistic reasons for selecting this effect.

From this point on, the film is a study of Aldo's long descent, witnessed by his young daughter.  He hitches rides with trucks, traveling across the un-trafficked, post-war Italian countryside, in search of a new life.  He hooks up with a couple of women he meets along the way.  His odyssey is no joyous Kerouac-esque adventure, however.  It is a study in how few emotional, educational, and economic resources male members of the post-war working classes possessed. 

He finds lodging in hovels and shacks.  His two short-term lovers are each desperate to find a man, and demand little from him.  The second provides him a job pumping gas on a forlorn, straight stretch of Po Valley highway.  But Aldo is unable to connect emotionally with either woman, except in bed.  That connection proves insufficient for him -- and certainly for each of the women -- and he drifts on and on, after sending his daughter back to her mother.

Finally, he returns to the town where he had left Irma.  He sees his seven-year-old daughter, now nicely dressed, entering a house.  He looks in the window, and sees Irma living a happy and (relatively) prosperous life. 

He walks back to the refinery, now deserted, about to be flattened and replaced with a modern airport..

He sees once again his watch tower, the symbol of his life when the going was good.  He climbs the circular stairway to the top, slowly, step by step.  He stares out across the bleak industrial/agricultural landscape of the misty Po Valley.  He leans over the railing a couple of times.  And then he tips over, falling to the ground.

Fine.