From the film which broke the co-production agreement with France (where they were offended by an all too faithful reconstruction of Affaire des J 3, and where it would be banned until 1963) and which, according to the Catholic producers’ intentions (Film Costellazione) was supposed to show the problems of post-war wasted youth, Antonioni distances himself from the more expressly neo-realistic elements of the project (the Zavattini-style inquest, the reconstruction of the actual facts, the sociological and ideological reading of the facts) to reaffirm the superiority of the director’s vision and the strength of the image itself. Reconstructing a Raskolnikov-esque crime in the post-war London of an aspiring poet looking for fame, the director “works with the unresolved detective story of the conscience rather than on the resolved detective story of the facts, stopping to contemplate their mystery instead of their reasons” (Stefania Parigi).

                                                                                                                                                              Paolo Mereghetti