Michelangelo Antonioni confounded the 1960 Cannes Film Festival with “L’Avventura,” but that high-modernist missing-person mystery did not emerge from a void. Three years before, the Italian master took the top prize at the Locarno festival with a scarcely less radical film, the existential love-story “Il Grido” (The Cry).
Long overshadowed by Antonioni’s later work, “Il Grido” gets a rare revival run at Film Forum in a new restoration, complete with several once-censored scenes.
Bracketed by the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy tarantella, “Il Grido” tracks the circular journey of the skilled factory worker Aldo (the rugged American actor Steve Cochran) who, rejected by his longtime common-law wife, Irma (Alida Valli), wanders heartbroken through northern Italy’s Po Valley.
Aldo, initially accompanied by his 6-year-old daughter Rosina (Mirna Girardi), takes a few odd jobs and hooks up with several women. A not unattractive if glowering hunk, he first drops in on the fiancée he had jilted (the blacklisted American actress Betsy Blair) only to depart the next morning. Stuck in a nowheresville gas station, he briefly takes up with the proprietress, Virginia (Dorian Gray, her voice dubbed by Antonioni’s muse, Monica Vitti), a lusty widow with an alcoholic father.
To please Virginia, Aldo sends Rosina home on a bus, but then takes off himself, eventually stumbling upon a vivacious prostitute, Andreina (the British actress Jacqueline Jones, under the name Lyn Shaw) who works an impoverished stretch of the river. Their brief liaison is less than satisfactory for both. Walking with her by the Po, Aldo starts explaining how he met Irma and lapses into confused silence. “What kind of story is that?” Andreina demands.
The lone working-class protagonist in Antonioni’s oeuvre, Aldo is lost in his own head, seemingly unaware that the Po River has flooded or that his hometown, selected by the government as the site for a new airfield, is about to disappear. The universe is indifferent. The world has no place for him. The movie’s barren, misty landscapes and melancholy piano doodling seem to mirror his disorientation.
While “Il Grido” can seem as aimless as Aldo is, the movie is full of incident and rich with subtext. The image of Aldo and Rosina on the road inevitably evokes two Italian classics, Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” and Federico Fellini’s “La Strada.” But, despite intermittent references to class struggle, “Il Grido” is not a leftist social tract. Nor is it a Catholic fable. Bleak yet droll, the scene in which Aldo and Virginia attempt to make love in a roadside ditch might have been conceived by Samuel Beckett.
Virginia’s inebriated father at one point teaches Rosina a revolutionary anthem, but such solidarity is beyond Aldo’s capacity to imagine. He returns to his village to find workers and farmers united in a most likely futile struggle against the government. Oblivious to the fields set on fire, Aldo searches for Irma, only to discover that she has found happiness without him.
“Il Grido” opened in New York, cut and dubbed, in October 1962. The New York Times reviewer A.H. Weiler declared it “realistically bereft of hope,” characterizing the film’s fade-out as “abrupt and somehow inexplicable.” Reflecting Antonioni’s view of life, “Il Grido” has an ending that is shocking, tragic and cosmic in its absurdity.
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