The Lady Without Camelias

The Lady Without Camelias

The Lady Without Camelias

The Lady Without Camelias

About sex and cinema 'The Lady Without Camelias' reaches new heights in technical quality and sexiness, for Antonioni, whilst thoroughly dismantling the superficiality of cinema.

"La Signora senza Camelie" is arguably Antonioni's first masterpiece. It's about a shop-girl 'discovered' by an ambitious producer who doesn't just want to make her a star but his wife as well and who then proceeds to make her miserable. It's not a great film about the cinema but then that's hardly the point; rather you can see in it the seeds of his later films about unhappy women and mentally abusive men. As the unfortunate Clara, rich and bored like so many Antonioni heroines, the little known Lucia Bose is excellent and visually it is often extraordinary. It doesn't quite fit into the broader and deeper contextualization of the trilogy that began with "L'Avventura" but in its treatment of its heroine it is unmistakably the work of its director and it's a much more intellectually rigorous picture than anything his contemporaries was doing at the time, For anyone remotely interested in following the trajectory of Antonioni's career this is essential viewing.

If this was a Hollywood film, starring a Rita Hayworth, it would be one of the famous ones. I don't like to use this line of thought but I find it apt here. The story is classic tragedy and the payoff in the end, the parting shot especially, overpowers like Sunset Blvd. It's only a footnote in the scheme of things then because we find it in the filmography of this particular director, a titan of cinema equaled only by a select few. In an early scene here we get a marvellous sketch of how movies create their icons. The producer and director fuss over the young movie starlet in a rehearsal, telling her what to wear, how to move and kiss, how to exude sex appeal. The girl allows herself to be swept up in this, ostensibly because the promise of being a face in the crowd is alluring. A few instances after rehearsing a scene where she makes out in a bed, we see her getting kissed by the man who pressingly courts her. Antonioni gives us a masterstroke here, framing the couple against a blank canvas, projected upon it we see the shadows of movie lights and a grip setting them up. Like the rehearsal scene that preceedes it, this too is a fabrication, orchestrated for a camera and audience. A lot of the rest is melodrama, competent if sometimes iffy. It may seem outrageous by our standards that a girl will concede to marriage the way Carla does here, but perhaps it reflects the times. The marriage is overbearingly hopeless though, a picture of sadness. When the film assumes power again for me, is when we see this young girl, shaped as a person by the movies, be broken by them. The scene builds up to a harrowing climax, with faceless crowds of extras waiting their roll call in a Cinecitta backlot, garish movie sets of sword-and-sandal flicks, the hubbub of movie people. Carla loses herself in this furore, once again allowing herself to be swept up. The overwhelming sadness of the finale is not simply that she acquiesces to too much because, though weak-willed, she's not a ditz. She's quietly spirited but unsure, a fragile, delicate thing thrown in with the lions, having been torn by two men who used her for their desires. It's that Antonioni leaves her there, to a cruel, loveless fate, and she deserves better.

Clara is a beautiful shop assistant projected into the movie world by her looks. Much like Bosè real story, her pretty face keeps her going, without her being much of an actress. Clara marries a pushy movie producer who is too jealous to allow her career as a sex symbol and makes her starring in yet another version of Joan of Arc, instead. The movie is a failure and Clara feel indebted with her husband, who lost lots of money. She completes the sexy comedy which was stalled by the husband and carries on an affair with a cynical diplomat, thinking it's "real love". Clara discovers too late that love is not part of the parcel and she's left with the only option of playing the lead in sexy and cheap comedies. It's somehow surprising to see how not so long ago, a woman was expected to obey her husband and refrain from expressing her wishes. Clara doesn't even know what she wants, she's just pushed around by all the men in her life. Her only relationship with a female "friend" is fake and opportunistic. Still, similar stories are going on even nowadays with lots of young starlets who last as long as their youth does, to be replaced by the next wave. Interesting movie, albeit not a great one.

Personally more appreciate and recognise Michaelangelo Antonioni for his influence in film rather than love him, but still consider him an interesting director and understand completely his appeal. His films are extremely well made and interesting on a thematic level (some like urban alienation being ground-breaking) and his directing style is unique. As has been said more than once though, his style and films are not for all tastes though, for while his films fascinate and transfix many they alienate and perplex others, both sides understandable. 'La Signora Senza Camelie' may not be one of his most best-known or most important films, other films of his may have scenes with slightly more staying power and explore their themes more broadly and deeply. Even though it is an early effort and made when he was still settling his style, 'La Signora Senza Camelie' is unmistakable Antonioni and still is a great film, if not quite extraordinary. Not one of his very best overall, but for me it is among his best of his early films. It is one of his more accessible films, one of the easiest to connect with emotionally for me and it had clearer and more individual character/story development than other films of his. Also he doesn't try to do too much here and he doesn't hammer the points home too hard that it feels heavy-handed. Visually, 'La Signora Senza Camelie' is very striking. The black and white still looks stunning, the scenery is wonderfully vivid in every frame and the photography often leaves one in awe. A big example being agreed in the rehearsal scene. The music is thankfully the kind that complements rather than clashes and has no trouble fitting with the tone and atmosphere. The writing didn't come over as rambling to me and instead came over as sincere and thought-provoking. It is in a way a melodrama, but it never really felt too melodramatic or overwrought. Didn't find the storytelling shallow or lacking clarity, the very intriguing themes handled in a way that made impact, both poignant and surprisingly cruel, but not in a way that one feels like they are being preached at. It doesn't come over as incoherent or confused either, or like a disjointed hodge-podge. The characters, particularly the titular character, have dimension and meaning, and much of the storytelling had charm and poignancy, didn't find myself detached here. The ending especially is very moving. The characters thankfully didn't feel like ciphers with some of the strongest female character writing seen in any film by me recently. Again, the male characters aren't as compellingly written but are not too bland. Antonioni a vast majority of the time drew good and more performances from his casts (with a few exceptions like almost all the cast in 'Beyond the Clouds' and the leads in 'Zabriskie Point'). 'La Signora Senza Camelie' is not an exception, with Lucia Bose giving a quite powerful lead performance and it is a shame that she didn't make it bigger judging from this performance. On the whole, a great early work by Antonioni and shouldn't be dismissed as a minor one. 9/10

Early Antonioni and although he is clearly feeling his way there are already signs of what is to become. We open with a fairly busy street scene and it becomes apparent the camera is following a woman along the pavement as first she pauses at an advertising poster and then approaches a cinema entrance. We only see her from behind and she enters the cinema to see the closing moments of herself on screen. It will later become apparent she is the star/victim of our picture. Later half the picture is taken up with a blank wall forming the corner of a street and a couple disappear behind it. There are several instances in sun and rain of cars and people walking across squares and beside buildings where the space is as important as those walking in its midst. Storywise the tale is more mundane. A naive young lady becomes committed to marriage without her knowledge, becomes involved elsewhere and the conflicts in her personal life are reflected in the conflicts in her working life in the cinema. Antonioni seems not to be a fan of popular cinema and if your vision is as sound and persuasive as his would prove to be maybe this is fine and another kind of popularity can be achieved but it is something of a stretch. Much cinema dismissed in the day as trash has survived with notable potency and resonance of the time and place whereas much arthouse cinema has disappeared without trace with charges of pretentiousness. Here we see the birth of Antonioni and whilst throughout his career he would construct scenarios railing against the men who presumed to control his icy maidens it would be his cinema eye, his certainty that place affects personality, that would carry most weight through his golden period from the late 50s up until his majestic and final great work, The Passenger.

Michelangelo Antonioni's La signora senza camelie immerses us immediately into modern-day myth - a young woman (Lucia Bose), discovered while working in a fabric store, becomes a star with her first movie, long before she has any sense of herself as an actress, or even as a woman. She allows the momentum to sweep her into marrying one of the film's producers, mainly because that's what he decides, and then into his unsuitable remake of Joan of Arc, a flop which immediately kills any sense of her (among industry and public alike) as much more than a pretty face. Summarized that way, the film may not sound much like Antonioni, and indeed the depiction of the filmmaking milieu (including some delicious looks at the filming of a cheesy sand and sandals flick) provides less exacting pleasures than we expect of him. But the film's ultimate narrative and thematic architecture, built on bitterly ironic personal defeat, is entirely his. After a period of withdrawal and attempted growth, she suddenly realizes (while wandering among a desolate-seeming group of extras in Cinecitta Studio) that it's all hopeless, and impulsively decides to embrace in all its superficiality the identity that the world seems to desire for her, accepting a superficial role that she'd previously turned down and even deciding to accept the ongoing advances of a man she'd also rejected, knowing the limits of his interest in her. In the final shot she poses for a celebratory group photograph - the photographer asks for a smile and she smiles, perfectly and chillingly, at once a star and a cadavre. The later Antonioni would no doubt have extended the sense of ambiguity and alienation in more complexly intuitive directions, but the sense of a director finding his fullest self is entirely apposite to the film's theme; by the same token, it's not necessarily a weakness that Bose doesn't convey the emotional grandeur of Monica Vitti in the great works to come.