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The sequence is masterful. With a few stark strokes Antonioni puts a diffuse and apparently senseless picture in a frame, in a black border of mortality that instantly reveals its perspective and its significance as a spiritual admonition, a memento mori. What's more, the frame reveals the picture as an extraordinary effort of style, as a definitive treatment of the themes Antonioni developed in L'Avventura and La Notte. As in those films, he employs the method of tedium to explain the nature of tedium, but he employs it so skillfully now that boredom is seldom boring. Vitti, as always, is endlessly fascinating, a luminous mannequin clothed with Antonioni's projections. And Delon is appropriately repulsive as a young man in a hurry. In the scenes at the stock exchange, Antonioni finds his brokers, as Auden found them, "roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse," and he simply throws his camera to the wolves. In one scene they yap and snap and snarl and slaver into the spectator's face for five, ten, fifteen minutes of financial frenzy.
Antonioni's style is beyond argument; his substance is not. No doubt he has reasons for his pessimism: millions of people now alive have lost their souls and will never find them; Eros in this era is all too often not a god but a disease; "the world today is ruled by money, and this leads to a dangerous passivity toward problems of the spirit." But sometimes Antonioni's pessimism seems almost as sick as the sickness he deplores, and certainly it is naive. The love of money is not, St. Paul to the contrary, the root of evil; and evil is not the dominant quality of modern life. Evil there is, but even in evil there is hope. As Mephistopheles admits in Goethe's Faust: ''I am the spirit that ever denies. That ever Evil wills and ever Good accomplishes."