Italian drama (I Vinti)
Director Michelangelo Antonioni’s message-oriented film (aka “Youth and Perversion”) is composed of three stories, featuring three murders in three different cities: Paris, Rome, and London.
This rather schematic anthology is regarded among the poorer and uncharacteristic efforts of Antonioni, who became a seminal figure in world cinema after the 1“LÁvventura,” in 1960. Mind you, the world premiere of that picture at the Cannes Film Fest was a success de scandal, booed by the audience, only to be reevaluated later by major critics who deemed it a masterpiece.
Accompanied by headlines and stories of newspapers, voiceover sets the theme of Antonioni’s uneven ”The Vanquished”: A lost generation that grew up during the war, for whom “the one law is lawlessness.”
The movie unfold as a cautionary tale: The perpetrators of crime are all affluent youths, each killing for his own selfish and dubious motive.
In the Paris segment, a group of adolescents kill for money, even though they don’t need it. In the London chapter, a poet uncovers a woman’s body and tries to benefit from the discovery. In Rome, a student becomes caught up in a dangerous smuggling ring.
“The Vanquished” suffered from a prolonged, troubled production process, due to the director’s inability to secure financial backing for his ambitious; it didn’t help that the text was somber and pessimistic.
Structurally, what unifies the film besides its central theme of juvenile delinquency is the fact that in each of the three segments a person commits murder and he himself dies or will be executed by the state. Each killer is older than his predecessor.
Detailed Plot:
The first episode is the strongest. On a holiday in the country, amidst one of cinema’s loveliest renderings of adolescent ache, one envious schoolboy shoots a bourgeois classmate dead and then robs him. The money, which wasn’t the motivation, turns out to be fake.
The college student in the second episode stays out all night; while his father thinks his son is painting the town with a girl, he is engaged in a smuggling operation.
The concluding episode depicts a man who collects money from a newspaper for reporting the discovery of a woman’s body in a park. It turns out that he murdered the woman to collect the money.
