The Vanquished

Antonioni's third film, with an unusual structure: three separate stories set in three countries. The common subject is that in post-war Europe the children of comfortable families are committing murders for no apparent reason. In France a group of young people kill a friend for money. In Italy a student smuggling cigarettes dies. In England a poet who finds a body in a park reports it to the newspapers himself, trying to become famous. All three were drawn from real cases, which got the film into trouble: the Italian section was forced to change by the censors, scenes were reshot and the character's political affiliation removed. Antonioni's interest is not in the murders but in the young people's absence of feeling: none of them can state a reason and none of them feels guilt. Its distribution was troubled and it went unseen for a long time. The sense of emptiness that becomes familiar in his later films appears here for the first time. Valuable for a viewer interested in early Antonioni and post-war Europe. For anyone wanting a whole, the three parts do not connect and are unequal; the English section is generally counted the strongest.