This is one of the best ghost stories ever made. 

It starts off one way, with a woman named Anna who mysteriously disappears. Antonioni then reframes the narrative, alters the shape of the story we thought we were going to see, and uses Anna's disappearance and lingering memory to haunt every crevice, every character, and every theme this film has to provide. 

Anna never reappears in the story, she's never heard from again, and in a way, it's like she never existed at all. Poof! She's gone. At the same time, Anna reappears everywhere, like the somber, slippery fog in IL GRIDO (1957). Her absence feels like presence in the form of the tumultuous guilt, shame and isolation of those she leaves behind.

Anna moves from foreground to ambient background. Sandro and Claudia move from background to existential foreground. They're like one of those florid, affluent couples right out of Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA (1960), and their sexual adventures, in the wake of Anna's exodus, speak to the ever-present disposability of traditional values, promises, and responsibilities in the modern age, if at no other cost than to seek pleasure in a world that only betroths death and betrayal. 

There's something slightly VERTIGO-esque about Anna's disappearance in relation to Claudia-as-replacement. It's as if Anna has seeded Claudia's imagination with a dream of love, marriage and togetherness, while in Sandro's mind she's just another helpmeet to be clung to while the world around him drifts away into frightening limbo. Nothing can be relied upon in this slippery but deeply felt world. Nothing is guaranteed except nothingness, evaporation, extinction, and disappearance, which Sandro and Claudia are left behind to contemplate. 

It's this disquieting sting, captured symbolically through Anna's disappearance, that must be masked, distracted and sated by the next sensual pleasure, even if disposable and temporary. Sandro and Claudia seem to be haunted by Anna's ghost in different ways, but their private anguish (which Antonioni expresses in such extended, prolonged, silent terms) really ends up dissolving the story into this profound, ambivalent quest for human connection in the midst of a lone and dreary wilderness. Feels religious at times.

There's an unstated, cyclical pattern I see in Sandro's behavior as well: this can't be the first time he's replaced one woman for another. It's not that he's like Hitchcock's Scottie attempting to refashion the perfect Madeleine. It's that he's ill-equipped, like everyone on this planet, to deal with monumental changes in consciousness, specifically as it applies to the disappearance of loved ones. Many women, perhaps, have come in and out of his life. Perhaps many men have drifted in and out of Claudia's too. They're both spiritually impoverished, like the barren island that mysteriously brought them together. Two lone peninsulas drifting in a sea of existential isolation, yearning for spiritual liberation, with no souvenirs of life extending beyond the grave. It's incredible how quickly they surrender to their desires once Anna is removed from the picture. It's also endlessly fascinating to watch them wrestle with the lingering anxiety of her possible return, as though Anna were clandestinely watching their affair from holier, god-forsaken spheres. The tension is so palatable at times, with Antonioni milking each frame with some of the most stunning photography I've seen yet. 

This is pure cinema. The kind of film that almost drifts into pure abstraction, but always gets tethered to specific events that give it grounding, even when it wants to float away and disappear forever. And let me just say one thing about that ending. It's a beautiful, albeit tragic thing to watch these empty human islands cling to each other through all the pain, guilt, confusion, betrayal and remolding done in the name of physical bonding. There are so many questions and unsolved anxieties in that final frame. In the same breath there also exists something transcendent, some weird, reconsidered desire that rises above all the hurt and offense, as if yearning to quell the universe's silent cry of despair and embrace whatever may come, however fickle or ephemeral. I'm having a hard time believing Antonioni will top this.

Antonioni Ranked