I Vinti

Commonly and to some extent unjustly written off as a failure, in part because of alterations imposed by censorship pressures that marred the first two episodes, Michelangelo Antonioni’s daring second feature (1952), originally released in England as Youth and Perversion, consists of three separate sketches chronicling senseless murders committed by young men in France, Italy, and Englanda contemporary existentialist document that could almost have been coscripted by Albert Camus. What’s most striking in all three parts of the film is the integration of incident with landscape without psychologizingsomething of an Antonioni stapleand the last and best segment strikingly anticipates Blowup by offering not only a corpse found in a park but a tennis match glimpsed in the final shot. Jean-Pierre Mocky, later a New Wave director, plays one of the French youths in the first section, and Fay Compton plays the murder victim in the last. In Italian with subtitles. 110 min. (JR)

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