[...] Antonioni's appetite for photographing street scenes or landscapes or objects at rest (as in the end of Eclipse) reminds one in some respects of the great Japanese director Ozu. But the difference is more revealing. Ozu takes cutaway shots -- separate inserts of a beaded-curtained hallway where the family is temporarily absent, or a lantern hanging in front of a restaurant -- and makes them into self-enclosed still lifes, restoring the world to its peaceful, static mode of objecthood. Antonioni's tendency is to start with his characters and, in the same shot, pan away from them, so that the effect is of losing sight of them, or, more pointedly, rejecting them. Unable to take quite seriously the difficulties and sickly longings of his characters, the reality of their sufferings, his camera eye seems pulled as by a magnet across the road, where he is able to do what he likes best: look at the anonymous world.

Cronaca is in fact a tragedy of social class, of a kind familiar to European audiences. A woman from a family of modest income is lifted into the upper classes by her beauty, but the sterility of that life bores her, she has no outlet for her emotions, dwells in the past, and takes (or retakes) someone from her previous milieu, an unemployed car salesman, as her lover. He, however, feels the new difference in their stations acutely. His first remark at their reunion -- ironic, admiring -- when she asks him if he finds her changed, is: "Yes. You have, I don't know -- class!" She tries to equalize their social position by offering to share her money, insisting that love alone has value, and ultimately proposing murder, which will put them on the same ethical if not financial plane; but he continues to act as if he is loving above his station. And that social distance, more than even their guilt at having contemplated a crime, may finally be what prevents them from sharing a future.

Antonioni's interest in local mores and the material divisions of the social world was obviously still strong when he made this first feature. Later it would evaporate in the face of a jet-set rootlessness: the filmmaker would take up comfortable international residence in what Georg Lukacs called "the Hotel Abyss." [...]