Beautiful to look at, hard to watch. Antonioni’s usage of form and background in a painterly mode is visually striking and is in itself conceptually rewarding. But the purposefully directionless plot is narratively trying and frankly exhausting. In a nontrivial way, the movie hangs on Vitti’s profound beauty and the actress’s ability to thread her character’s erratic, troubled personality through the proceedings. It works mostly, but not entirely.