Story of a Love Affair

tidal waif

i like how the large takes of the music accompany the carefully distributed, separated and rhythmical space of a city. it's like all the rhythm and stomping vigor of jazz have been sucked out of the score and transplanted into the neat, precisely cut lines of the cityscape. maybe that's where the feeling of something so unmistakably urban unfolding before your eyes.

Eric Rucker

Builds to amazing intensity thanks to the progression from plain to increasingly expressive photography, from looser to tauter formal qualities, mirroring the main charcters' psychology and counterbalancing the melodramatic elements of the film. Better than Hitchcock and with a social conscience. The tension of a Neorealistic lead male and a melodramatic, silent-film, Louise Brooks-style lead female is ingenious.

Zac Weber

Story of a Love Affair is a more straightforward endeavor than Antonioni's later masterpieces, but it's still a mix of beautiful moving images and cinematic formalism. I wish I could take the film in without subtitles, but oh well. Two images in particular stand out in my mind: the shot of Lucia Bose staring around the car door, and Paola and Guido walking through the park while a man plays guitar.

msmichel

Striking feature debut by Antonioni hinting at the greatness to come with this nourish but intellectual exercise that looks at past secrets and lies between a couple doomed to repeat their past mistakes. Lucia Bose (a young Miss Italy at the time) is fabulous here just radiating class, sexuality and mystery. Fabulous script with an ending that is just about perfect leaving the viewer to take the story further.

Thomas

An admirable first feature from Antonioni. He already shows a strong visual style in the framing of shots, as well as an informed eye for integrating natural landscapes and architecture into compositions. The plodding narrative is routinely handled with mediocre acting, but the cars and costumes are real standouts.

Wee Hunk

The sound is bad. It sounds like everyone is talking into a trash can. I had zero compassion for her. She's just a spoiled teenager. What I thought was interesting about the film was how important class was. The lover was acceptable because although he had no money, he did have class. Some of the other characters who were lower class seemed like stereotypes. This film had very brief flashes of style.

Stefano Pedrocchi

Hints of Antonioni to come, not properly there yet though; but it's an important node that will lead to La signora senza camelie and Il grido: Milan, with its shadows, its architecture, has yet to become the well finished character it'll be in La notte, but you can see that it does start to be intentionally shaped. Serafin's photography is really impressive and Lucia Bosè suits very well in such a classy character.

innersmiff

Stripped down and straightforward storytelling-wise, but quietly engaging and tension-filled. None of the pretentiousness of later Antonioni. The music is bad.