Enrico Fontana, a businessman with too much money for his own good, hires a private detective to see if his young wife Paola (Lucia Bosé) has been cheating on him. The good news is, she isn't…yet. But Enrico's paranoid probing stirs up an old boyfriend, Guido (Massimo Girotti), who reminds Paola that, no, she hasn't really forgotten about him. Will Paola and Guido's relationship survive? Will Enrico survive till the credits? And what exactly happened between Guido's fiancée Giovanna and that elevator shaft?

Story of a Love Affair, which instigated my first-ever film noir cram session ("I know nothing about this genre! Crap!"), is director Michelangelo Antonioni's first feature film. He'd spent the 1940s making documentaries, and echoes from those days are certainly in this movie. Its native title is Cronaca di un Amore, and cronaca is Italian for "chronicle." This word suggests a news broadcast: objective footage in which its subjects tell their own stories.

In fact, that's exactly what many of Love Affair's "subjects" do. In the film's first several minutes, Inspector Carloni interviews Paola's high school teacher, her tennis coach, and her disgruntled school chum. However, these people tell us much more about themselves than they do about Paola. Her old teachers-and I mean OLD teachers-exude an oily, pedophilic nastiness: "Pretty girl!" exclaims the professore, and the principal tells him, "Mind what you say." The tennis coach knows far too much about Paola's boyfriends and after-school habits for my comfort. Then there's Matilde, an old "friend" of Paola's who denies, vehemently, that they were ever close.

If the film's minor characters are this interesting, what about Paola herself? We see her first in photographs, while detectives hash out details of her life. She's an object, a piece of property for men to argue over. Paola's status as a possession is even more obvious when she shows up in the flesh. Leaving the opera house with her husband, she's wearing a white fur coat and looks like a living dress-up doll. Enrico forgets her birthday and jokes that a colleague wanted to buy her for 300 million lira. ("Only 300 million?" she asks).

Being a trophy wife is hard work, and Paola is just plain tired of it all. "Tell them I don't feel well," she says to Enrico when he wants to go out with their friends-who, judging by their cars, are probably as rich and shallow as he is.

But Enrico's wife is by no means an unmitigated victim. When Guido, a car salesman, complains about his lack of funds, she hatches a plan for her husband to buy her an ultra-expensive Maserati through him. The idea of killing Enrico doesn't faze her at all; she even demonstrates for Guido how to do the deed. Is Paola a hero? A villain? Madonna? Whore? In film noir, all dichotomies are blurred, the lines between them scribbled over by the crayon of a jaded child. The gangsters are sympathetic, the cops are crooked, and Fred MacMurray says, "Goodbye, baby" as he shoots Barbara Stanwyck in the heart. Paola's no angel, no demon. Just human.

Actress Lucia Bosé is perfect for such a morally ambiguous role. As Antonioni once said, her face "never deforms whether she's laughing or crying." This quality sometimes makes it hard for the audience to tell what she's thinking. It's not that Bose is wooden: it's that this woman is so mysterious that her husband has to hire a private investigator to find out anything about her.

Martin Scorsese has said that Story of a Love Affair is one of his favorite movies; if he sees what NoShame Films has done with it, he'd probably squeal like a schoolgirl. The film looks excellent-its picture is clear and sharp, with very nice contrast between gray and black. (No sepia-toned images here). When you consider that Story of a Love Affair's original negative was destroyed in a fire-and that the lavenders NoShame had to work with weren't in much better shape-the presentation isn't just good. It's miraculous. Sound is a little fuzzy, but that's likely due to its being dubbed in. I only wish that the English subtitles had been colored, and maybe a little bigger. It's really hard to read white letters on a gray background. Even so, this film looks much, much better than anyone could've expected.

But NoShame doesn't stop there: this 2-disc set has some truly enlightening extras. Aside from poster and still galleries (including backstage photos), this 2-disc set has a feature on the film's restoration with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno; footage of the new print's screening in Rome, with soundbites from Lucia Bosé and some other special guests; and "Identification of a Masterpiece," which contains analysis by several film critics and assistant director Francesco Maselli and is longer than the actual movie. Though these extras suffer from a few seconds of soundtrack-buzz and some bizarre ghosting effects, I found them far more unique and insightful than most DVD extras today.

I don't have much experience with film noir, and even less with NoShame Films. But Story of a Love Affair has whetted my appetite (really! I'm drooling here, people) for more of both.