By film’s end, Giuliana has seemingly adjusted to life, after her soliloquy to the foreign sailor. It’s not that she is ‘better’ than she was when the film started, nor as healthy as she was before the accident that precipitated her breakdown, simply that she has adjusted to life. Valerio asks her about the yellow smoke pouring from one of his father’s factory’s smokestacks, and Giuliana explains that the birds have learned to avoid flying through the poisonous smoke. They then exit the frame.

Giuliana has learned to adapt or die, just as the birds, and this is proof that, unlike what many bad critics have claimed for this film, she is not a bored housewife, rather a very sensitive (almost hypersensitive) woman whose very engagement with all things at all levels, and her inability to process all of this, is what so distresses her. There are no faux heroics in this film. She will simply go on, as in real life.

Technically, the film is a marvel. The score by Giovanni Fusco is brilliant when and where it is deployed, with its quasi-sci fi and proto-industrial tinge (which seems to presage what Kubrick brought to full fruition in 2001), and the cinematography by Carlo di Palma is among the best of his career. Not only does the color scheme alternate between realistic and glaring, but Antonioni makes great use of multiple cameras and angles, wide angle lenses and telephoto lenses to compress the image of Giuliana into her world one dimensionally even as she tries to burst out into higher dimensions of experience, as well as in a Stygian sequence when smoke bellows from the factory as Ugo and Corrado talk business, and their humanity is rendered meaningless next to the monstrous creation they have made, subsumed by the compression of the image done with a telephoto lens.

Then there is the scene at Corrado’s hotel room, where she and he have sex, which mirrors the erotic landscapes of the fable with the little girl, and afterwards, the room glows pink, just like the sands on the beach. This is a vivid example of John Keats’ negative capability — the power to make seeming leaps of illogic that cohere logically in retrospect.

Film does this better than any other art medium because it moves at the speed of light, and is not as abstract as writing is. That so few critics have made this connection is puzzling, since it is almost blatantly thrown in the viewer’s faces; yet considering how dumbed down most criticism in all the arts, is, it is not really a great surprise.

Another oddity about the critical reception of the film is a) how few critics mention the meaning of the title, and b) because even fewer likely understand what it refers to, which is the lack of eros in not only Giuliana’s existence, but in that of all the depicted characters. Still a third rather obvious thing that is never mentioned is that Giuliana’s hair color subtly changes in every scene she’s in. It ranges from a dark auburn to light blond, yet not a word has been written of this, much less its meaning.