For anyone who’s only aware of Michelangelo Antonioni through his mid-career classics (L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, Red Desert, etc.), his first feature filmmaking effort, Story of a Love Affair, may come as a bit of a surprise. If you’ve been faithful enough to follow him through his most recent efforts (1995’s Beyond the Clouds and his sequence from the recent omnibus Eros), the picture falls into place much more clearly. Love Affair is a tawdry little thing, an assured near-noir of private eyes, hidden affairs, seedy love nests, and a pair of almost-murders, and while it features plenty of small figures isolated in gargantuan landscapes that accurately predict the brooding vistas of masterworks to come, the overwhelming fatalism and moral turpitude end up front and center whereas in, say, L’Avventura, the layers of ambiguity cake over a narrative that’s got more than a little smut at its heart. It’s the kind of film that, like Les Dames du Bois de Bologne or This Night’s Wife complicates top-down readings of a filmmaker most often viewed through the lens of a handful of available, canonized works.

Fabulously wealthy Milanese businessman Enrico Fontana (Ferdinando Sarmi), curious about the past of his much-younger wife, Paola (Lucia Bosè), enlists the aid of a pair of detectives whose investigation dredges up the suspicious demise of one her closest school friends on the eve of her wedding to Guido (Massimo Girotti). Tipped off about the investigation, Guido travels from Ferrara to Milan to warn Paola, rekindling an affair that had lain dormant since the death of his fiancé seven years prior. As the investigators get closer to uncovering their relationship, and Paola chafes under the attentions of her husband, spending more and more time with Guido, the film veers close to Double Indemnity turf, as the two lovers push each other closer and closer to committing murder though, in a lovely twist that mirrors the lingering questions surrounding the earlier death, nothing pans out quite as they’d expected.

While Story of a Love Affair is granted a regal two-disc treatment from upstart NoShame Films, nothing outshines the mere presence of the film in its first U.S. pressing. Short DVD extras like Story of a Peculiar Night (covering the Italian premiere of the restored print), and Fragments of a Love Affair (a guided tour of some of the shooting locations) are markedly overproduced, and an article and interview in the booklet feel hurriedly translated at best. The restoration undertaken by Cinecittá is lovely, but one wishes that similar care had been undertaken with the English subtitling, which is rife with spelling errors though not so distracting as to be detrimental to viewing.

The package touts an endorsement from Martin Scorsese, and it’s easy to see why he cares for the film so—Story of a Love Affair is one of those pivotal little movies that sticks out awkwardly from the time in which it was made, neither here nor there, representing a bundle of fascinating contradictions. It’s the exact kind of rediscovery DVD was meant for. Hopefully NoShame (or another intrepid distributor) will take the next step and bring Antonioni’s equally fascinating The Lady Without Camillas back into availability so that film lovers can, finally, accurately, assess the career of a master.
—JEFF REICHERT