Il Grido (The Cry)

... every object in a film is an experience of the viewer’s. After all, what does the director do? He conveys what he thinks he has seen. But, good Lord, the meaning of reality, living as we do enclosed in ourselves, isn’t always clear to us. We could discuss for hours an episode or even an object found on the street. And the same thing is true of a filmed episode or object. Except that I never ask explanations from what I see in real life, but with a film I ask the director. But the director is only a man. Very often I cannot give an explanation because I see only images, and images are what I transfer to the screen. Very often these images have no explanation, no raison d’etre beyond themselves. (Antonioni interviewed by Charles Thomas Samuels in 1969) 

With his fourth film, Le Amiche [The Girlfriends], Michelangelo Antonioni had attained a new urgency in his work. It was an adaptation of a novel by Cesare Pavese in which a successful woman from the working class finds herself in the company of a group of diffident middle class dilettantes who are so bored by being alive that one of them tries – but fails – to commit suicide at the start of the film and tries again near the end – and succeeds. They were the same people found in his previous films – The Story of a Love and The Lady Without Camellias, except that the protagonist this time was from a poor family who had succeeded in escaping into professional success. 

Antonioni wrote the script for Il Grido [The Cry-1957], the film he made after Le Amiche, with Elio Bartolini and Ennio De Concini, based on his own original story. Once again his protagonist is working class, except that the world that Il Grido explores is several levels below that of Le Amiche. The river Po flows from the mountains west of Turin all the way across northern Italy to the Po delta south of Venice. The film is set, and photographed entirely in the dreary, fogbound, industrial region along the river north of Ferrara – with its factory towns whose men work long hours for little money and whose families scrape by. Aldo, Antonioni’s central character (played by the American actor Steve Cochran), works in a sugar mill and has lived with Irma (Alida Valli) for seven years, despite Irma having a husband working in Australia. They have a small daughter named Rosina. When the film begins Irma is informed of her husband’s death. She is upset, but not for the reason we think. For four months Irma has been involved with another man, so when she tells Aldo that her husband is dead, he expects her to marry him right away. When she explains that things have changed, but not in the way he thought they would, his shock is so intense that Antonioni follows the incredibly slow process of his disintegration through the rest of the film. 

Aldo seeks advice from his mother, who tells him she is a “bad woman,” but that “there must be a way to bring back her feelings.” So Aldo confronts Irma in the street and, with the whole town watching, he slaps her savagely several times and when he’s finished shouts, “Now, come home!” Irma rearranges her hair and walks past him, turns and says “Now it’s really finished.” Aldo takes his daughter Rosina with him and he leaves the town – called Goriano – and takes to the road, stopping first at Pontelagoscuro (“hidden lake bridge”), north of the city of Ferrara. There he finds an old flame, Elvia (Betsy Blair). After discovering that he still loves Irma, Elvia asks Aldo why he came. “Because I have nowhere else to go,” he says. Somehow, that nowhere takes him farther and farther away from Goriano. 

Over the course of several months Aldo takes up with two other women, Virginia (Dorian Gray), who owns a filling station, and Adreina (Lynn Shaw). Both of them attempt to make Aldo stay with them, but fail. When Rosina catches Aldo and Virginia “making out” (as depicted, you could hardly call it anything else), Aldo puts her on a bus bound for Goriano. The seasons pass, the cold turns to wet, and Aldo decides to retrace his journey back. On the way, Virginia tells him that Irma had sent him a postcard, but that she misplaced it and can’t recall what was written on it. Perhaps believing that Irma was asking him to return, Aldo goes back to Goriano to find the town is about to be bulldozed in some eminent domain scheme to make way for a military airstrip. Police try to block him from getting into town but he runs past them. He sees Rosina in the street and follows her to a house. When she goes inside Aldo looks through a window and sees Irma, happily changing a baby’s nappie. With a crushed look on his face, he walks slowly away from the window. Irma sees him, hands the baby to a servant (giving away part of Irma’s reason for leaving Aldo in the first place) and she follows him through the town. 

The streets are crowded as everyone gathers to protest the assembled bulldozers. Aldo walks to the sugar refinery where he once worked. He had mentioned to Adreina how he could climb to the top of the refinery tower and could see the house where he lived and could even see Rosina at play. Now he ascends the metal stairs to the top of the tower to – one assumes – take one last look. Just as he reaches the top, Irma arrives below and calls out to him. He looks down and, swaying with dizziness, falls to his death. “The cry” of the title is Irma’s as she watches him fall. 

I’ve recounted this much of the story because it’s all the viewer has to go on. Antonioni never quite indicates what Aldo’s motives are, since Aldo can’t put them into words. A few critics believed that Aldo climbed into the tower for the express purpose of jumping to his death, but Antonioni leaves such a pat explanation in suspense. Causation takes a considerable hit in his later films, which is one of the reasons why some of his actors chafed at his direction. What they wanted was motivation – a reason for the characters' actions, but Antonioni couldn’t give it to them. The why in his films is never indicated. 

Aside from his post-Passenger work, Il Grido is the least known – and least appreciated – of Antonioni’s films. It has been linked with his first film photographed in color, Red Desert, because of its focus on the landscapes and the environment in which his characters find themselves. Gianni Di Venanzo, the film’s cinematographer, grounds Il Grido in its landscapes. Shades of grey predominate – even under snow, it looks like the outskirts of hell. If Antonioni was using the landscapes to reflect Aldo's emotional state, Aldo must've been utterly miserable. Giovanni Fusco supplied the film with a suitably plaintive, mostly solo piano, score.

Aldo is yet another complex failure. Like Sandro in L’Avventura and Giovanni in La Notte, he is talented but unfulfilled by his profession. He attracts women but he doesn’t know what to do with them and consistently disappoints them. The women – except Irma, who knows him better – all want him to stay with them. Steve Cochran, who was clearly not an obvious choice for the lead (the film was co-produced by Robert Alexander Productions out of New York, and probably asked for an American lead), but he does what Antonioni required of him. His attractiveness to women is painfully clear. Alida Valli is fine as a somewhat more complex “bad woman.” Also memorable is Gerrino Campanilli as Virginia’s wine-loving father, who teaches Rosina communist revolution songs and hides wine bottles all over the house. 

Il Grido wasn’t released in the US until late 1962, after L’Avventura and La Notte had made a splash with critics. In the New York Times, second-string reviewer A. H. Weiler commented: “One is made to feel that Mr. Antonioni is not interested in explanations so much as in character and situations.” I think Mr Weiler hit that nail on the head.