Uneasy Love: Sentimental Diseases and Crisis of the Couple in Antonioni's Movies

In His Autobiographical Writings and Interviews, Michelangelo Antonioni (1994) has always stated that although Rossellini and Visconti were later to become the leading exponents of Neo-realism, it was his own first work, the short Gente del Po (People of the River Po), made in 1943, that was the first Neo-realist film. This movement was the expression of the particular reality of the Italian way of life after the Second World War, a difficult and dramatic period, and the characters in the Neo-realist films showed their relationships with that reality.

But then, as time passed and the social situation returned to normality, Antonioni maintained that it was not so important to investigate this relationship, but rather to focus on the characters and their psychology, and eventually to examine what effects the past had had on them. This gave rise to a series of films set in the bourgeois environment of the middle-classes, from which Antonioni himself came—films in which the central theme are the difficulties in love relationships. Spiritual sterility, lack of interest, coldness, cynicism, are to be found in an internal vacuum which becomes, within a relationship, noncommunicationand alienation—even if Antonioni himself never accepted these terms, too charged for him with Marxist and Existentialist ideology. He was convinced that—quite apart from the particular historical and social conditions—those difficulties were