wild boys
by Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo Antonioni, Giorgio
Bassani, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Diego Fabbri, Roger Nimier and Turi Vasile (screenplay),
Michelangelo Antonioni (director) I
Vinti (The Vanquished) / 1953
Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, I Vinti (The Vanquished), his third film, was not well-received upon its
first appearance. In fact, the tripartite film about young wealthy kids in
France, Italy, and England who, for meaningless reasons, each commit murder,
was banned—at least the first section—in France; evidently it still remains
banned today, in part because the father of one of the original figures
involved in the real case threatened to sue Antonioni.
But it doesn’t take much imagination to comprehend why in that decade,
seven years out from Godard’s Breathless—a
film he and Truffaut were working on when Antonioni’s film was released, and
which was postponed because of the outcry against The Vanquished—would have been perceived as shocking, particularly
since Antonioni does not even attempt to explain “why” his juveniles committed
their real-life crimes, and in his objectivity does not truly condemn them.
In fact, The Vanquished already
belonged to a growing tradition of just such films, murders by juveniles whose
motives were vague at best. Hitchcock’s Rope
of 1948, reminding audiences of the Leopold and Loeb murder of 1924, and
which was later revisited in Richard Fleischer’s 1959 film, Compulsion, was similarly about wealthy
schoolboys, who murdered—in this case just to experience the thrill of killing.
The first French episode of Antonioni’s trilogy has the most in common with the
Hitchcock work, as a group of young male and female school friends have already
predetermined to shoot and rob the most handsome of their group, Jean-Pierre Mocky, who has long bluffed about his wealth and
his sexual prowess.
Unlike Leopold and Loeb, they want his money to escape the worlds in
which they feel trapped, planning all sorts of imaginary destinations,
including Algeria. Yet the schoolmate who does the shooting discovers that the
money the victim was carrying is all obviously counterfeit. And a few moments
before, the victim has admitted to a girlfriend he shares with the shooter,
that his stories about his older lover are all just fiction.
This part of the film also reminds us, somewhat, of Los Olvidados (The Young and
the Damned), Luis Buñuel’s 1950 film—although the boys of earlier film have
clearer reasons for their actions given their extreme poverty. Yet the seeming
group rapport that also dooms one of them presents obvious parallels. As in the
1957 musical West Side Story, their
“gang”-like communality helps them to survive, but yet assures their own
self-destruction.
Abandoning what later became Breathless,
in 1959 Truffaut offered up his own version of bad-boy behavior in The 400 Blows, although unlike the
second, Italian, section of Antonioni’s
film, Antoine Doinel is merely a
petty robber who even attempts to return what he has stolen. The wealthy
Italian boy, Claudio (Franco Interlenghi), on the other hand, raises his cash
as an organized cigarette smuggler. When customs officers interfere with his
actions, he goes on the run, killing one of the officers on the chase. A jump
from a high ledge seemingly affects his head, as he continues on the run before
finally dying of his injuries.
Today, this second section is the favorite of most critics. And one can
immediately see why. Here, the director is on his own territory, and instead of
telling a complex story, we mostly are shown, as Claudio seeks out his
jazz-loving girlfriend, the urban and barren suburban landscapes that are
closer to his films of the 1960s, the period of his greatest achievements. The new
erected new high-rises on the edge of the city remind us also of Fellini’s
works and Antonioni’s Eclipse and The Red Desert. Since the handsome boy
is doomed almost from the beginning, Antonioni shows his character’s inner
duress primarily through outer actions, using the landscape itself to express
the character’s inner self.
Antonioni not only recognized this, but spoke clearly of his intentions:
“I chose to examine the inner side of my characters instead of their life in
society, the effects inside them of what was happening outside. Consequently,
while filming, I would follow them as much as I could, without ever letting the
camera leave them. This is how the long takes of Story of a Love Affair and The
Vanquished came about.” And although the landscape of this wealthy boy does
not explain everything, it presents us with enough shifting realities that we
certainly can comprehend the boy’s angst if not his specific choice of
avocation.
The English section is certainly the weakest. The young would-be poet
Ken Wharton (Patrick Barr) murders a middle-aged woman he meets simply out of
psychological motives. This spoiled schoolboy simply wants attention, and first
gains it by calling the police to report the discovery of a body, delighting in
a newspaper photograph of himself and his false narrative of what happened.
But when that quickly becomes yesterday’s news, he approaches the police
once more to admit that he has committed the murder, assured that there will be
no evidence for them to convict him. He has no ties to the woman he has
murdered, Mrs. Pinkerton, and absolutely no reason to have even met her or why
he might have wanted to kill her. This is truly Hitchcock territory, the story
of a sick mind, and is out of kilter with Antonioni’s more oblique approach to
the truth. We know the boy is guilty without even caring about his reasons; and
so does the jury.
The only thing that truly links these three—other than their almost
pointless killings—is that like so many of the generation of children who grew
up during World War II, they felt restricted by and isolated from their parents
who, after so many years of chaos, were seeking more orderly and ordinary ways
of living. To the older generation their children’s behavior simply seemed to
make no sense. Like yet another cinematic example of these youthful feelings,
Jim Stark (James Dean) of Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film, Rebel without a Cause—a high school boy who, without intention was
the cause of two deaths—they perhaps cannot even themselves express why and how
they feel as they do. The war their parents had suffered in real space had
moved inside their heads. All they know is that they need to “get out” of wherever
they are, that they are desperate to find some vague “other” life. And in
Antonioni’s study of three such beings we have a marvelous and early guide to
what would later define so much of the best cinema of the period. New Wave directors
devoted much of their careers to just such figures, and Fellini and others
followed them into middle age.
Los Angeles, May 6, 2018
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2018).
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