This has the attributes of a great and terrible film in one: The great film has the camera tracking work, the almost reposed editing, the sense of movement without a direction and wonderful photographic composition.
The terrible film has inept story structure and bad plotting; pretentious (in the sense that it aims for something it fails to execute properly) allusions to ideas; a very bad secondary story and acting which seems worse because the English actors are not guided by their Italian director.
It could have been written by Camus and if so, it would have needed a narrator to get inside the head of the Nicholson character - as it is, it tends to be a travelogue of a man who is uncertainly written by second rate writers. If a novelist had done this job, an editor would have rejected it immediately for its gaping holes e.g. how the Schneider character is involved which just poor plotting.
The terrible film has inept story structure and bad plotting; pretentious (in the sense that it aims for something it fails to execute properly) allusions to ideas; a very bad secondary story and acting which seems worse because the English actors are not guided by their Italian director.
It could have been written by Camus and if so, it would have needed a narrator to get inside the head of the Nicholson character - as it is, it tends to be a travelogue of a man who is uncertainly written by second rate writers. If a novelist had done this job, an editor would have rejected it immediately for its gaping holes e.g. how the Schneider character is involved which just poor plotting.