Story of a Love Affair (1950): lies, PIs and neorealism from Antonioni (Review)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film begins with a set of photographs being displayed for the camera and a warning that this won’t be the same old story. Already, he’s making promises: promises of narrative innovation, clearly, and promises that the camera – and therefore the viewer – will be active participants in his films. Orson Welles famously accused Antonioni of thinking that “because a shot is good, it’s going to get better the longer you keep looking at it”. For my part I do sometimes feel that way about modern slow cinema, but never Antonioni. Even the most challenging longeur in his films is shot through with a sense of authorial purpose and camera-subjectivity, a sense that he wants you to actually look at this and interpret it rather than just basking in slowness for slowness’s sake.

Story of a Love Affair, released in a gorgeous new crystal-clear restoration by Cult Films, sees Antonioni working towards his mature style. He perfected that style a decade later in 1960, when L’Avventura inaugurated the long and noble tradition of Cannes audiences booing films they would later pretend to have instantly recognised as masterpieces. For a director both decried and acclaimed for his indifference to traditional plot, there is an awful lot of story in this love affair, and he sometimes seems unsure of how to handle it. Look deeper, though, and there are some major pointers to the future here.

The story is loosely inspired by James M Cain’s classic noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, though it’s not an adaptation – Antonioni’s peer Luchino Visconti had beaten him to that with his debut, 1943’s Ossessione. Both Ossessione and Story of a Love Affair see their directors straining against the prevailing neorealist mode in Italian cinema, with genre elements and – in Antonioni’s case – a cast of well-off characters. It’s the tale of a private detective hired by a wealthy industrialist to look into his trophy bride’s past, and the investigation which unwittingly reconnects her with an old flame.

There is the seed of a theory about cinema in here – the way that observation and interpretation can force characters into action, a theme picked up in his first non-Italian film, Blowup. Antonioni isn’t ready to hit those heights yet, and it is unsatisfying when the investigator, Carloni, is relegated to the background while the affair blossoms. But there is a delicacy in Antonioni’s observation of human behaviour, and the ambiguous death of a major character points the way ahead to the wilfully uncrackable mysteries of L’Avventura or The Passenger.

If I’ve been talking a lot about what Antonioni did later, well, blame Orson for that as well. Ever since Citizen Kane there’s been an assumption that great directors are the ones who start off by making a great movie, whereas a lot of the key names in European art-house – Antonioni, Dreyer, Fellini, Bergman – took a while to find their voice. Just because they got better, though, doesn’t mean their initial works are bad. Story of a Love Affair, like many of his early films, shows the former documentarian in love with blocking, creating elegant ballets of camera and character movement across each interior. It’s a more old-fashioned kind of mise en scene than his mature works, but it’s tremendously seductive. Soon, the increased ease of location shooting with smaller cameras would make this a lost art, and it’s true that something like Red Desert wouldn’t work when shot this way. But it’s hard not to be impressed by the skill and confidence of the debut director’s staging of scenes.

Its greatest asset is Lucia Bosé, though, who gives an absolutely iconic performance as Paola, the young wife under surveillance. Bosé was Antonioni’s partner at the time, and she seems to have worked out how to articulate his signature theme – the relationship between people and their environment – before he himself could properly explore it. Her manner, tone of voice and bearing change subtly but unmistakably depending on who she’s with. Presumably, as a former Miss Italy, she also had some say in how Paola’s hair, clothes and make-up keep shifting as she moves between multiple lives. Bergman may be the one who actually called a film Persona, but the title would do for every single one of Antonioni’s films – not least this one.

Thank you for reading our review of Story of a Love Affair

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