When I see her comin' down the street
I get so shaky and I feel so weak
I tell my eyes look the other way
But they don't seem to hear a word I say
And I, go to pieces and I wanna hide
Go to pieces and I almost die
Every time my baby passes by
I tell my arms they'll hold someone new
Another love that will be true
But they don't listen, they don't seem to care
They reach for her but she's not there
And I, go to pieces and I wanna hide
Go to pieces and I almost die
Every time my baby passes by
I remember what she said when she said
"Goodbye baby. We'll meet again soon maybe"
"But until we do, all my best to you"
I'm so lonely, I think about her only
I go to places we used to go
But I know she'll never show
She hurt me so much inside
Now I hope she's satisfied
And I, go to pieces and I wanna hide
Go to pieces and I almost die
Every time my baby passes by
Go to pieces and I cry
Every time my baby passes by
Go to pieces and I cry
One of my favorite songs. Del's best, and yes, a fantastic lyric. I never met a cover of this song I did not like (including Del's own from the late seventies or early eighties), yet none of them touches his original, heartbreaking performance.
ReplyDeleteYes. You have it exactly right. Curtis
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ReplyDelete”Il Grido/The Cry” is the director’s examination of the traumatic encounter of an Italian industrial worker, a decent person and gentle soul with a fiasco of his marital relationship which destroys his whole life. No, there were no black shirts intervention into his life, nor allied bombings crushed the roof of his house. The events of the film take place during the period of economic-cultural modernization after WWII that after a long Mussolini’s rule was considered as an incredible luck for all the Italians.
ReplyDeleteAldo doesn’t expect from life too much – he is happy just to live with the woman he loves, to have a stable job and help his daughter to grow up. But while a new promising period of intense economic and cultural development offered people opportunity to earn extra-money and enjoy more entertainment, these “benefits” were complicated by the destabilization of personal relationships, jobs and living arrangements and withdrawal from or losing concentration on political issues and thinking about life..
Antonioni focuses on Aldo’s love life which became nomadic and fractured and finally made it impossible for him to continue to live. “Il Grido” is a “proletarian” introduction to a number of Antonioni’s films about the problems of human love in post-war life (which he made after “Il Grido”) based on the life of middle class couples (L’Avventura – 1960, “La Notte” – 1960, “L’Eclisse” – 1961, and “Red Desert” – 1964).
Analyzing Aldo’s relationships with women Antonioni depicts what can be named as the four phases of de-privatization of intimate relationships which express degradation of amorous potentials of human love in conjunction with particularities of life under destabilizing conditions of a “nomadic” economy, mass culture of cheap entertainment and growing consumerism.
Relations with Irma (Alida Valli) whose rare gift of psychological wholeness of her reactions made her for Aldo a personification of Being which he could unconditionally rely on, he lost by unexpectedly learning from her about her infidelity. For him it was more than the break of togetherness with a woman he loved and the mother of his daughter – losing her was for Aldo like being banished from the very origins of life. The incredible, simultaneously sensual and “abstractly enigmatic” acting of Alida Valli made Irma a personification of Italy of economic miracle, which betrayed its children (Irma leaves, and Aldo became an eternal wanderer searching for love, jobs and hope).
Antonioni describes four phases of the shattering of the very human ability to love – psychological separation between love and sex (represented by Aldo’s relations with Alvia and Edera), intervention of despotic conditions of work into a private time (his relations with Virginia, the owner of a gas station), and intervention of other amorous/business relations into beloveds’ privacy (Aldo’s relationships with Andreina). Without love and without a decent job Aldo returns to his old town where he used to live with Irma and where she now lives with her new husband and their new born baby and Irma and Aldo’s daughter. Is Aldo return to die (without conscious intentions to be over-dramatic)?
It is Irma’s “cry” when she saw Aldo feeling lightheaded and losing his balance on the tower of the factory where he once worked, and falling down in front of her, what provided the title of the film and what signifies the inability of the human culture to care about its sons during the most prosperous and cheerful period of Western economy.
Antonioni is not idealizing Aldo – he doesn’t transform him into “pure victim” of circumstances or “system”. He tries to understand his psychological particularities (Aldo can share with others) which makes him unable to resist the dead ends modern culture puts under feet of many people as time bombs.
Thank you so much for writing and for visiting. This is a great addition t my knowledge and this post. I'm currently taking a break as I get acclimated to a new job, but I will be back. In the meantime, please enjoy the last four years of posts. Curtis
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