wild boys
by
Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo
Antonioni, Giorgio Bassani, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Diego Fabbri, Roger Nimier an
Turi Vasile (writers), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) I Vinti (The Vanquished) / 1953
Turi Vasile (writers), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) I Vinti (The Vanquished) / 1953
Michelangelo
Antonioni’s film, I Vinti (The Vanquished), his third film, was not
well-received upon its first appearance. In fact the tripartite film about
young wealthy kids in France, Italy, and England who, for meaningless reasons,
each commit murder, was banned—at least the first section— in France; evidently
it still remains banned today, in part because the father of one of the
original figures involved in the real case threatened to sue Antonioni.
In fact, The Vanquished already belonged to a growing tradition of just such
films, murders by juveniles whose motives were vague at best. Hitchcock’s Rope of 1948, reminding audiences of the
Leopold and Loeb murder of 1924, and which was later revisited in Richard
Fleischer’s 1959 film, Compulsion, similarly
about wealthy schoolboys, who murdered—in this case just to experience the
thrill of killing. The first French episode of Antonioni’s trilogy has the most
in common with the Hitchcock work, as a group of young male and female school
friends have already predetermined to shoot and rob the most handsome of their
group, Jean-Pierre Mocky, who has long
bluffed about his wealth and his sexual prowess.
This part of the film also reminds us,
somewhat, of Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), Luis Buñuel’s
1950 film—although the boys of earlier film have clearer reasons for their
actions given their extreme poverty. Yet the seeming group rapport that also
dooms one of them presents obvious parallels. As in the 1957 musical West Side Story, their “gang”-like
communality helps them to survive, but yet assures their own self-destruction.
Abandoning what later became Breathless, in 1959 Truffaut offered up
his own version of bad-boy behavior in The
400 Blows, although unlike the second, Italian, section of Antonioni’s
film, Antoine
Doinel is merely a petty robber who even attempts to return what he has stolen.
The wealthy Italian boy, Claudio (Franco Interlenghi), on the other hand,
raises his cash as an organized cigarette smuggler. When customs officers interfere
with his actions, he goes on the run, killing one of the officers on the chase.
A jump from a high ledge seemingly affects his head, as he continues on the run
before finally dying of his injuries.
Today, this second section is the favorite
of most critics. And one can immediately see why. Here, the director is on his
own territory, and instead of telling a complex story, we mostly are shown, as
Claudio seeks out his jazz-loving girlfriend, the urban and barren suburban
landscapes that are closer to his films of the 1960s, the period of his
greatest achievements. Indeed the rising new high-rises on the edge of the city
remind us also of Fellini’s works and Antonioni’s Eclipse and The Red Desert.
Since the handsome boy is doomed almost from the beginning, Antonioni shows his
character’s inner duress primarily through outer actions, using the landscape
itself to express the character’s inner self.
Antonioni not only recognized this, but
spoke clearly of his intentions: “I chose to examine the inner side of my
characters instead of their life in society, the effects inside them of what
was happening outside. Consequently, while filming, I would follow them as much
as I could, without ever letting the camera leave them. This is how the long takes
of Story of a Love Affair and The Vanquished came about.” And although
the landscape of this wealthy boy does not explain everything, it presents us
with enough shifting realities that we certainly can comprehend the boy’s angst
if not his specific choice of avocation.
The English section is certainly the
weakest. The young would-be poet Ken Wharton (Patrick Barr) murders a
middle-aged woman he meets simply out of psychological motives. This spoiled
schoolboy simply wants attention, and first gains it by calling the police to
report the discovery of a body, delighting in a newspaper photograph of himself
and his false narrative of what happened.
The only thing that truly links these
three—other than their almost pointless killings—is that like so many of the
generation of children who grew up during World War II, they felt restricted by
and isolated from their parents who, after so many years of chaos, were seeking
more orderly and ordinary ways of living. To the older generation their
children’s behavior simply seemed to make no sense. Like yet another cinematic
example of these youthful feelings, Jim Stark (James Dean) of Nicholas Ray’s
1955 film, Rebel without a Cause—a
high school boy who, without intention was the cause of two deaths—they perhaps
cannot even themselves express why and how they feel as they do. The war their
parents had suffered in real space had moved inside their heads. All they know
is that they need to “get out” of wherever they are, that they are desperate to
find some vague “other” life. And in Antonioni’s study of three such beings we
have a marvelous and early guide to what would later define so much of the best
cinema of the period. New Wave directors devoted much of their careers to just
such figures, and Fellini and others followed them into middle age.
Los Angeles, May
6, 2018
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