Minority View: Chronicle of a Love by Michelangelo Antonioni blog

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One of the most productive categories in the crime film - in terms of the general quality - is the category loosely called ‘˜film noir'. Noir is a genre identified more by a mood than by a clear set of conventions and if defined broadly enough, it includes categories like the hard-boiled detective story, usually taken to lie outside the pale. If, however, there is a broad theme unifying the various sub-categories in noir, this could be that noir is usually about ordinary people drawn into criminality by circumstances and paying the price. To elaborate, crime films (e.g. the whodunit) usually treat the ‘˜law enforcer' and the ‘˜criminal' as different kinds of human beings. Noir collapses the two categories and there are a large number of noir films in which the law enforcer is gradually drawn into morally questionable behavior. In Claude Sautet's Max and the Scrap Merchants (1971), for instance, a judge-turned-policeman infiltrates a gang of small-time thieves who steal scrap metal and induces them to undertake an unsuccessful bank robbery.

While there have been noir films from virtually every country (Hindi cinema had noir like Jism and Zeher earlier in the decade) each ‘˜national' kind of noir has apparently its own flavor, which can be traced to some kind of national trauma. Ordinary people induced by the promise of wealth into committing murder is a common theme in American film noir - from The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) to Fargo (1996). French noir, on the other hand, seems not particularly interested in greed as a theme. French films - the best known filmmakers are JP Melville and Jacques Becker who made their films in the 1950s and 1960s - seem more concerned with the issue of friendship and betrayal of trust, and Melville's Le Doulos (1962) and Becker's Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954) are archetypal examples. Italian cinema is not particularly known for noir films but Antonioni's first film Chronicle of a Love (1950) is yet another kind of film with its own preoccupations, perhaps derived from neo-realism.

Michelangelo Antonioni is arguably the most important Italian filmmaker and his L'Avventura (1960) represents one of the high points of European film modernism. After this film Antonioni made a large number of very influential films from La Notte (1961) to Blow-Up (1966) but, although the films are intriguing and visually striking, one senses a strange hollowness about them - it is like a great magician reworking from a bag of old tricks. Chronicle of a Love is an earlier film in which Antonioni was departing on his own from the vastly influential movement that Italian cinema will always be known by - neo-realism.

In Chronicle of a Love millionaire businessman Enrico Fontana engages a detective to investigate the past of his young wife Paola, who has revealed little of her own early life to him. The detective probes into Paola's college days, her friendship with two other girls, the death of one of them in an accident and Paola's possible relationship with Guido, who was apparently the dead girl's boyfriend. The detective's investigations disturb the position of equilibrium and Paola and Guido (who have not seen each other for several years) are brought together again - to plan Enrico Fontana's murder.

Where most noir films have concerns that are moral, Antonioni focuses on the milieu.

Antonioni shows that he has a great eye for social behavior but, instead of dealing with the working class as in the neo-realist classics, he takes a hard look at the ways of the bourgeoisie. But more than this, Antonioni demonstrates that moral choice is not simply the prerogative of the individual but that the milieu influences and intervenes in every decision. To elaborate, where in The Postman Always Rings Twice the wife and the lover kill the husband for his money and are tormented not only by guilt but also their mistrust of each other, Antonioni tries to show how the milieu is responsible for the extreme decision not their own private compulsions. It is difficult to provide a clear account of how Antonioni achieves this but it is as if individual effort is subverted at every instance. Guido is a car salesman short of money and Paola initially wants her husband to buy a Ferrari from him so that the commission he earns will keep him in comfort for a while. Things don't work out the way she planned and the car is not sold. But this leads to other things and, at one point, Fontana's murder is the only way out.

Italian neo-realism can be roughly described as a film movement with ‘˜social determinism' as a governing principle. People don't behave the way do because of what they are but because of the way the milieu acts upon them. Noir, because its stories are concerned with the exercise of moral choice, does not share the philosophical premises of neo-realism. That Antonioni can, in his first feature, take the conventions of noir and rework them to do just the opposite of what the genre strives for is a mark of his great ingenuity. Chronicle of a Love is not a well known film but it is Antonioni at close to his best.