The Lady Without Camelias

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Audience Member a formative parable on society's unsustainable expectations of women Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Audience Member Antonioni's second feature shows his interest in women's experiences to be in full bloom. I haven't read the play by Alexandre Dumas Fils (Lady with the Camellias or La Traviata or Camille) that Antonioni is referencing with the title but it seems to be about a woman who gives up her spoiled existence (albeit as a courtesan) to join her true love in a relationship which is ultimately thwarted because of concerns about propriety raised by his family. Here, the opposite seems to be happening: Lucia Bosé has no camellias - meaning she comes from a lower-class existence as a shopgirl and is thrown into a different sort of life as an actress discovered by a B-movie producer. Of course, the reason she is "discovered" is because she is sexy and the producers seek to exploit her appeal, a goal which she is willing to indulge. However, soon she is pushed into marrying one of the filmmakers (who she doesn't love) and he jealously tries to put the brakes on her career as a sexpot, opting instead to try her in a "serious" picture which he chooses to direct himself (a predictable flop). In short order, their relationship is on the rocks, she is courted by a local diplomat (perhaps only interested in her fame) and she finds it increasingly hard to know what to do. She goes back to B films to make up for the financial hardship resulting from her foray into arthouse film, but her dreams have now grown bigger; she takes herself more seriously, but inevitably finds herself typecast and trapped in degrading exploitation fare (even as her producer ex-husband has successes from which she is excluded). The ending is as bleak as you can get and you don't have to have read the Dumas novel/play to realise that Bosé's plight as a woman exploited by men, tainted by their objectification, and left to suffer with no standing of her own nor ability to pursue and fulfil her own goals is even more tragic (and relevant) than the earlier more famous work. Antonioni, of course, would continue to examine alienation as his key theme, toying more overtly with viewers' expectations (and pictorial abstraction), a process only just begun in his early films. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/04/23 Full Review Audience Member A fairly decent effort by Antonioni that very much looks and feels like an early b/w-version of "The Red Desert". Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/18/23 Full Review Mike M A little bit stodgy and self-absorbed, convinced to some extent that the travails of movie people are worth three times more than those of anybody else... although there are flashes of the Antonioni to come in the onscreen director's coldly modernist apartment and the bleak scrap of land to which the heroine drives with her consul lover; it is a contemporary tragedy, albeit of a more conventional kind than Antonioni's turn-of-the-60s masterworks, and the absence of any easy point of identification could be read as deliberate, rather than an authorial failure. Almost there, but not quite: it'd take another few years of off-set experience for Antonioni to figure out there is more to life than the vacillations of actresses. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 07/14/11 Full Review Audience Member Eine Art Übergangswerk, und zudem ein weiterer Schritt in der Passage durch die Kinogenres des frühen Antonioni. Hier beginnt er in der Form der Komödie und arbeitet erwartungsgemäß mit recht großen Differenzen zwischen Form und Inhalt. Beeindruckend aber, wie unversöhnt er LA SIGNORA SENZA CAMELIE schlussendlich in eine seiner großen Tragödien kippen lässt. Nachdem die Form im Grunde von seinen frühen Kurzfilmen an schon ganz da war, spricht hier vielleicht erstmals der Filmkünstler Antonioni, kurz vor der Vollendung. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/11/23 Full Review Audience Member quel beau moment, la discussion entre la Bose' et Alain Cuny Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/22/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Lady Without Camelias

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