La signora senza camelie

Lucia Bosè is a starlet in search of an identity as a persuasive Milanese-shopgirl-turned-sex-symbol. In anticipation of Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE, Antonioni brilliantly opens the film with an image of Clara seen from behind, as an anonymous pedestrian – tracing her fingers across a movie poster and then turning into the cinema entrance. As she joins the crowd inside, the first clear image we have of any face in the film is the large one looming on the movie screen, which subsequently proves to be her own – a succinct introduction to that discontinuity that registers with such cumulative force in the film’s final shot: when the capacity to smile for publicity photographs becomes the very token of her alienation and despair. ( Jonathan Rosenbaum)