This film by Michelangelo Antonioni amazed me in its special cinematography, exploring beautifully in black and white doors and windows, glasses and reflexes, bars and water, lights and shadows, and the blurred borders between visual arts and reality. The central issue, unhappiness and ending of relationships, with a blasé hopeless and melancholic way of life, is addressed in a sluggish but not properly bad way, and it goes well as both cinematography and Monica Vitti's face cause a striking impact on spectator, and from time to time there are very inspired dialogue lines. The serious and unforgivable problem is that this is one of the most racist films I have ever watched. Vitti's character Vittoria makes a bizarre black face in order to have fun playing with the exoticism she sees on African continent which she does not know even slightly. Marta, another character, a white woman born in Kenya just like the actress Mirella Ricciardi, who played her, loves the country and its natural beauties, but compares black people to monkeys and calls them stupid and savage. There is also eventually a scene that, taken alone, would not be considered as racist, but that, given the context, I do think it is: there are two black men sitting outside the place from where Vittoria goes out to meet her friend. The two guys do not move a muscle, do not say anything. Their appearance is completely irrelevant for the story or the situation. However, their pose, never mentioned by a single character, does remind a lot the stereotype of lazyness that was so common in Southern United States. The movie is also dated, besides its racism, in how shooting elephants and hippopotamuses to death is presented as something light and normal. Going back to the central plot, I must add that Alain Delon's character Piero is a perfect metaphor of his own job as stockholder: for him, everything and everyone may be gotten or thrown out, he is shallow and selfish, greedy and heartless, cynical but potentially irascible, empty-minded and sexist, frenzy and apathetic at once. Quite bad choice by Vittoria for a second relationship...
