Antonioni has said of his first color film, shot in the industrialized North of Italy: “The film was born on the spot and the color was born with it.... My intention was to express the beauty of this world where even the factories can be very beautiful....” The story, by contrast, is of a woman (Monica Vitti) suffering severe depression in reaction to the very industrialization Antonioni claims to find beautiful. “The beauty of the images reflects and reveals an industrial environment hostile to the heroine, friendly to her husband (Carlo Chionetti), and towards which her transitory lover (Richard Harris) expresses ambivalence. Again the themes of the alienation of modern man, of the insurmountable difficulties of communication between men and women, particularly in the urban bourgeois milieu, of nostalgia for a more innocent natural environment...are present in Antonioni's work....” (M.J. Affron, Audio Brandon)