Vitti, Monica

L'Avventura - Criterion Collection

Considered by many to be his masterpiece, L'Avventura positioned Michelangelo Antonioni as an international talent. What appears to be a search for a missing person is actually an examination of alienation and self-discovery found along a voyage through the morally decadent world of the idle rich. Less concerned with a smooth plotline, Antonioni tells his story through the use of symbolic images and flawless character development. Using 'real time' camera shots and rich, landscape imagery, Michelangelo Antonioni creates an unpredictable world where nothing is ever resolved. Ironically, what makes L'Avventura so unpredictable is the high level of realism portrayed by each character and their environments. This isn't your packaged, formulaic film with a happy ending. A tough one to watch but well worth it...and it gets better and better with repeat viewings. L'Avventura is quintessential Antonioini. Not to be missed. --Rob Bracco

A girl mysteriously disappears on a yachting trip. While her lover and her best friend search for her across Italy, they begin an affair. Antonioni's penetrating study of the idle upper class offers stinging observations on spiritual isolation and the many meanings of love. Criterion is proud to present this milestone of film grammar in a new Special Edition double-disc set.

L'Eclisse - Criterion Collection

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse rolls over you and wraps you in its stylish embrace. The plot, such as it is, follows Vittoria (luscious Monica Vitti, The Red Desert) as her engagement falls apart and she slowly falls into a giddy but anxious affair with Piero (Alain Delon, Le Samourai, Purple Noon), a trader in Rome's stock exchange. Like Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage, Persona), Antonioni examines the nuances of human relationships--but where Bergman is dense and dialogue-driven, Antonioni is spare and visual (there's maybe a page of dialogue in the first fifteen minutes of L'Eclisse). Every frame is like an exquisite black and white photograph, yet there's nothing static about this movie. It's fluid, sleek, and graceful, achieving its own kind of visual music. L'Eclisse contrasts opposing elements: Light and shadow, noise and silence, laughter and death, love and money, desire and dissatisfaction. Critics often describe the movie as a portrait of modern alienation, but they focus too much on Vittoria herself; while she finds her own life wanting, all around her Antonioni's camera captures a much larger world, full of as much vitality as despair, as much hope as loss. This is a movie essential to anyone's understanding of what movies can be. --Bret Fetzer

The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni's informal trilogy on modern malaise, which began with L'avventura, L'eclisse (The Eclipse) tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) only to drift into a relationship with another (Alain Delon).

La Notte

Continuing the "alienation trilogy" that began with L'Avventura and ended with L'Eclisse, Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte is a visually arresting, emotionally numbing exercise in chronic ennui. The film's anesthetizing effect is entirely intentional; Antonioni's central couple (Marcello Mastroianni as a self-absorbed novelist, Jeanne Moreau as his bored and wealthy wife) wallow in their own emotional desolation, constantly drifting--and in Moreau's case, literally drifting--from one disaffected scene to the next. Antonioni's pained study of modern detachment is richly supported by his visuals, often placing his isolated characters in a harsh landscape of empty glamor and even emptier emotions. Driving the point home is Monica Vitti as Marcello's would-be mistress; in their aimless lassitude, neither can muster the necessary passion. It's all too superficial to register with any lasting dramatic impact, but La Notte remains the fascinating work of a master, redefining how movies reflect the many facets of humanity. --Jeff Shannon

Antonioni's study of alienation and moral decay chronicles a day in the life of a middle-class couple whose marriage has been destroyed by mutual indifference and impenetrable loneliness.

Modesty Blaise

A pop-art explosion that makes Austin Powers look demure, Modesty Blaise is a bizarre relic from the heyday of Swinging London. Based on a comic book, the movie is strong on psychedelic art direction, long on camp (especially Dirk Bogarde's aristocratic, white-haired villain), and thin on plot--and what plot there is cannot possibly be deciphered. Italian actress Monica Vitti, the ennui-weary star of many Antonioni classics, makes an odd choice for stylish spy Modesty Blaise (a female 007 without portfolio), especially given her uncertain command of English. The gifted director Joseph Losey, not noted for his humor, apes various New Wave techniques in his approach, even allowing Vitti and costar Terence Stamp to warble an off-key song. But the most coherent contribution is the jazzy swing of John Dankworth's score, which you won't be able to get out of your head, even if you want to. --Robert Horton

Phantom of Liberty - Criterion Collection

Any serious lover of film eventually (if not immediately) succumbs to the genius of Luis Bunuel. The bottomless wit and unsentimental clear-sightedness of the Spanish master is evident throughout his career, but Bunuel has the added bonus of never tapering off, never losing his edge. The Phantom of Liberty was produced when Bunuel was in his mid-70s, and it's as hilariously impertinent as anything he ever made. Along with his (and anybody's) key collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, Bunuel strings together a series of reverse-logic dreams and surrealist blackouts, which flow from one to another without building into anything like a conventional storyline.

A nurse at an inn is sidetracked by a foursome of poker-playing priests, while an S&M couple down the hall invite everyone to their room for a drink and a show; a sit-down party has guests seated on toilets around a table; a police commissioner receives a phone call from his dead sister. None of it makes sense, except that it makes absolute sense. By the time a little girl is reported missing by her frantic parents, despite the fact that she is manifestly with them in schoolroom and police station, the film has entered the zone where comedy and unnerving observations come together in a perfect way. Many top European actors participate in this exercise, including Michel Piccoli, Monica Vitti, Jean Rochefort, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Perhaps the format limits the film from gaining the resonance of latter Bunuel films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or That Obscure Object of Desire, but it's a marvelous surrealist variety show. --Robert Horton

Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Bu±uel's surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soir#e with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of nonsequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Bu±uel throughout his career-from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.

Red Desert

Richard Harris and Monica Vitti star in writer/director Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece. An alienated Italian wife searches for meaning in the industrial lunar landscape of Northern Italy, to no avail. Highly acclaimed as a masterpiece of visual form and the winner of the International Critics Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival in 1964.

The Scarlet Lady

Antonioni favorite Monica Vitti (L'AVVENTURA LA NOTTE) stars as Eva a French perfume heiress whose life comes to a crashing halt after learning that her knavish boyfriend Julien (Robert Hossein) has squandered her fortune. Eva's plan of revenge is to kill Julien and then herself--but not before she spends the last week of her life on a posh shopping spree in Paris. Bathed in the atmosphere and textures of 1960s France this unexpected comedy also stars Maurice Ronet as the man who attempts to deter Vitti from her suicide mission--and help her rediscover the simple pleasures of being alive.System Requirements:Running Time: 90 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN/LATIN Rating: NR UPC: 825307908398 Manufacturer No: PH90839

An Almost Perfect Affair

The Dolls