Reflections on ... Story of a Love Affair (1950) aka Cronaca di un amore.

Recently watched: Story of a Love Affair (1950) aka Cronaca di un amore. Trust me - never was a title more bitterly ironic! A bleak Italian neo-realist interpretation of American film noir very loosely inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice, Love Affair represents the feature film debut of art cinema virtuoso Michelangelo Antonioni (1912 - 2007). His icily detached perspective, ambivalence towards his characters (he certainly never invites sympathy for them) and emphasis on desolate cityscapes are already present and correct. If Love Affair initially feels a bit inconsequential and unengaging, persevere – the tension really builds as it proceeds, and the ending is devastating. And remember: Antonioni wants you to feel alienated! 

Love Affair is a meditation on guilt, consequences, human weakness and fatalism. Smouldering nineteen-year-old Lucia Bosè (whose sultry dark looks anticipate Isabella Rossellini and Natassja Kinski) is swathed in furs, veils and spectacular haute couture ensembles as Paola, the petulant and spoiled young trophy wife of millionaire Milanese industrialist Enrico (Ferdinando Sarm). (Antonioni ensures we repeatedly observe Paola snap abrupt orders to her staff: “Get me cigarettes!” “Get me a martini!”). When she’s reunited with Guido (ruggedly handsome dreamboat Massimo Girotti), a lost love she hasn’t seen in years, Paola begins scheming for them to run away together. But Guido is penniless, and she can’t countenance the thought of abandoning the fabulously lavish lifestyle she’s become accustomed to. Soon Paola starts hinting the solution is for Guido to murder Enrico …   

To complicate things: the jealous Enrico has hired a private detective to investigate Paola’s past. And Guido and Paola share a painful dark secret from years earlier: they may have killed before! At the very least, their amoral self-absorption contributed to a tragic accident. The camera swoons over the combined beauty of Girotti and Bosè. They are perhaps the most exquisite couple in Italian cinema history right up until Antonioni teamed Monica Vitti with Alain Delon in L'Eclisse in 1962. (Antonioni and Bosè would reunite in 1953 for the even better The Lady Without Camelias). Bosè died of coronavirus complications aged 89 in 2020. 

Reflections on ... The Velvet Underground documentary (2021)

Recently watched: Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground (2021). My quick thoughts!

I found it hypnotic, but it’s intended for Velvet Underground fanatics (my boyfriend Pal and I watched it at The Institute of Contemporary Art. He found it numbing and admitted to almost falling asleep!). The first note of music you hear is the lacerating scrape of John Cale’s viola on “Venus in Furs.” It still sounds alien and abrasive! As the kids would say today, it’s a “deep dive”: Haynes is keen to provide context, so there's an emphasis on the early sixties avant-garde / experimental music and underground cinema subcultures that spawned The Velvet Underground in the first place. (I shuddered in ecstasy when clips from Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures cropped-up). As an unapologetic Nico obsessive, I was thrilled by how respectfully and seriously she’s depicted. (All too often she’s been dismissed as a footnote in The Velvet Underground story). In the past drummer Moe Tucker has spoken contemptuously about Nico, but in the doc, she clearly states that no one sang those three songs better and that it always sounds wrong when anyone else tries. (Tucker isn’t asked about her subsequent embrace of far-right Tea Party politics!). Either Gerard Malanga or Danny Fields notes that when Nico first emerged and wasn't famous yet in her own right, she'd get compared to Dietrich or Garbo as a reference point and that now other singers get compared to her. My interest in the VU peaks with the timeless 1967 debut album and once Warhol, Nico and Cale split, that's it for me. But it does make you wonder: why was Reed such an antagonistic prick? He's still an enigma. But Reed was very cute, sexy and charismatic in his youth so got away with murder. Reed's older sister Merrill - a therapist - is intensely likable. At one point we hear a sixties novelty song called "The Ostrich" that one of Reed's pre-Velvet Underground bands recorded, and she obligingly jumps up and does the dance that went with it! The perennially fierce Warhol superstar Mary Woronov is always a welcome presence. There's a fascinating home movie clip of life at Warhol’s Factory with everyone lounging around acting bored and sullen while a woman reads aloud horoscopes from the newspaper. Everyone pointedly ignores the camera except for International Velvet, who strikes pin-up poses and clearly yearns for attention. At the centre of the documentary is the conflict between “frenemies” Reed and Cale. It’s explained that as a child of the fifties, Reed’s musical imagination was steeped in doo-wop and rockabilly. The collision of that with Cale’s classical / experimental sensibilities resulted in the signature Velvet Underground and Nico sound. Haynes’ greatest triumph is that you completely forget watching it that there is virtually NO concert footage of The Velvet Underground performing in existence. He well and truly overcomes that obstacle.

Reflections on ... The Grim Reaper (1962) aka La commare secca.

Recently watched: The Grim Reaper (1962). Original title: La commare secca. 

“You’ll die covered in lice!” Seriously – Italians have the best insults! A vivid slice of life in the gutter adapted from a short story by highly politicized low life poet/provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Grim Reaper (21-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci’s directorial debut) opens with the discovery of a murdered prostitute in the park alongside The Tiber. The ensuing film unfolds in flashbacks, as the potential culprits recount their versions of what happened that night while being interrogated by the cops. Meanwhile, Bertolucci repeatedly cuts back to the doomed sex worker (starkly unglamorous and middle-aged with a careworn face) getting ready for work in her flat, drinking espresso, pinning-up her hair, oblivious that she has a date with death. 

Out of all the mid-twentieth century Italian art cinema directors, Bertolucci is the one I’m least au fait with. The Grim Reaper is firmly in the gritty tradition of Pasolini’s early masterworks Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) and Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). In fact, it offers an irresistible cornucopia of all my favorite Italian neo-realist leitmotifs! Raw egg-sucking. Prostitution (everyone is seemingly either a pimp or on the game themselves. The tough hetero-flexible Italian boys depicted here are seemingly open to turning tricks, if only to rob the johns of their gold watches). Petty crime. Rough trade in tight pants. Italian men sexually harassing girls on the street. Women with ratted hair and heavy black liquid eyeliner. Nuns. The Colosseum. Women wearing Anna Magnani-style black slips. Grubby urchins playing in the street. Hungry characters speaking wistfully of potatoes in meat sauce and gnocchi. Ads for Campari and Cinzano everywhere. 

This isn’t a spoiler, but the conclusion offers a bleakly pessimistic assessment of mankind. “She was only a whore!” the killer shouts in protest when he’s finally apprehended.

Note! Don't confuse this film with this one! 

Reflections on ... the death of Warhol Superstar Ivy Nicholson

/ Pictured: Ivy Nicholson in her 1950s supermodel heyday /

“Ivy Nicholson was a working-class girl from New York City who lit up the 1950s as one of Europe’s top fashion models, married a French count, posed topless for Salvador Dali and became one of the first “superstars” in Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was a flashbulb life built on bravado and sheer magnetism. But it was not a solid life, and when the 1960s ended and the big checks stopped coming, she was left on her own. She spent her last decades in or near poverty, sometimes homeless, telling anyone who would listen that she was on her way back up.” 

The New York Times obituary for erstwhile fashion model and Warhol Superstar Ivy Nicholson (née Irene Nicholson, 22 February 1933 - 25 October 2021) – who has died aged 88 – is compulsory reading! My highlights from her fabulous, messy life: 

“In her 20s Ms Nicholson appeared on the covers of Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Bazaar and other magazines. She built a reputation: fearlessly inventing characters and looks for her shoots, but often arriving hours late to the studio and refusing to pose until someone brought foie gras or met some other demand.” 

“When Howard Hawks flew her to Egypt in 1954 for a role in his epic movie Land of the Pharaohs, she objected to the studio’s multiyear contract. So, as she later told the story, she bit one of the actors to get out of the deal. Her replacement was Joan Collins.” 

“She went on to get small parts in Italian movies and by her account became obsessed with the actor Anthony Perkins. When he did not return her affections, she later said, she slit her wrists. The suicide attempt cost her a role in Federico Fellini’s 8½, according to her unfinished memoir.” 

Reading it, I was struck by Nicholson’s parallels with her fellow Warhol superstar Nico (another international supermodel in the fifties who actually did appear in a Fellini film) and Maila Nurmi (aka horror movie hostess Vampira), who also heedlessly squandered opportunities and burnt bridges in her prime and later lived in poverty. (Nurmi also romantically pursued Tony Perkins!).  

/ Andy Warhol and Ivy Nicholson in 1964 /

As a frequently homeless older woman, Nicholson maintained her sense of style and looked strikingly ravaged and wraith-like (like Nico, Chet Baker or Anita Pallenberg she exuded ruined glamour). Despite clearly difficult hardships, the admirably resilient Nicholson seemingly lived on her own terms and remained a free spirit until the end. What a woman! 

Read the full obituary here. 

See late-period portraits of Nicholson by photographer Conrad Ventur here. 

A nice insight into what Nicholson was like in her New York bag lady phase.