Success Quote by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni frames liberation as the great modern mirage: everyone lunges for freedom, then discovers the bars are internal. The line is deceptively conversational - "the whole bag of tricks" - but the casualness is part of the sting. He reduces conscience and sin to stage props, not because he dismisses them, but because he’s diagnosing how thoroughly they’ve been absorbed. Even in a secular, affluent postwar Europe, the old moral machinery keeps running, now less like faith than like reflex.

The intent is almost programmatic: a mission statement for his cinema of drift. Antonioni’s people aren’t melodramatic rebels; they’re professionals, lovers, bourgeois wanderers who can name their dissatisfaction without locating its cause. That’s why the struggle "fails" so often in his films: the obstacle isn’t law or poverty but the persistence of judgment - self-judgment, social judgment, the ambient expectation that desire should come with a receipt and a penalty.

Subtextually, he’s also poking at the fantasy that freedom is a clean break, a single brave decision. "Cut themselves loose" evokes escape artistry, yet conscience won’t cooperate; it clings like an undertow. This is Antonioni in the era of Italy’s rapid modernization and the broader European crisis of meaning: traditional religion eroding, consumer comfort rising, relationships thinning into gestures. His characters keep moving - across landscapes, apartments, parties - because motion looks like agency. The films insist that movement is often just another way of staying stuck, and that the most binding chains are the ones you learn to call your own.