DVDFile

Kino / 98 Minutes / 1950 / Unrated / Street Date: February 7, 2012

As a first film, Story of a Love Affair is a mesmerizing document, a primer coat of sorts that offers frequent hints as to the sort of methodical, brooding filmmaking genius Michelangelo Antonioni would evolve to become. As a standalone film of its own narrative value, however, this is a low-level curio of a movie, one that houses flashes of lusty, romantic intrigue, but is mostly a mishmash.

I'm hard on the film partly because ten years after Story of a Love Affair, Antonioni was making L'avventura and Red Desert and Blow Up, movies that were not only international successes, but the most iconic members of the filmmaker's staggering oeuvre. In short, with those movies looming so large over every other project he embarked upon, it's difficult not to hold lighter works like Story of a Love Affair up to their standards. 

In this romance noir, a wealthy Milanese businessman named Enrico (Ferdinando Sarmi) is convinced that his young and gorgeous wife Paola (Lucia Bose - a one-time Miss Italy!) has a couple of man-friends on the side, so he hires a detective to flush her out. Obviously skittish from all this, Paola turns to a familiar face: Guido (Massimo Girotti) and she once had a passionate affair as young folks, and they give it a try yet again. But one thing leads to another, mysteries are revealed, she tries to get him to kill her husband - you know the drill.

Antonioni utilizes Enzo Serafin's cinematography here exceptionally well, and again, there are moments within Story of a Love Affair that are undeniably Antonioni-esque, but the movie as a whole is lumpy and unconvincing, a lusty treatise on the tumult of mid-20th-century Italy that neither succeeds as an anthropological investigation nor makes for much of a romance.