I wish I didn’t love you, or that I loved you much more…
A couple of years back in the old normal, the BFI ran a
spectacular Antonioni season and this was the only major work I missed seeing
on the big screen… how very good of them then to programme it as part of their
re-opening season of Big Screen Classics. How could I not be there for this,
mask on, hand gel at the ready and even beard trimmed should anyone recognise
me from the days before. I feel so much of a connection with Charlton
Heston right now and if you swap guns for vinyl records, I'm your omega man and we’re cooking Solent Green with gas although we'll never escape this planet of so many damn apes.
Special measures in place I was guided through unfamiliar
routes the NFT 1, every other seat of three taken out and pre-booked precision
now essential. A short promo plugs the cinematic survivors and urges us to
return and when things are as well organised as at the BFI, there is no reason
to hold back; this old-new normal, feels comfortable already and the reward is
worth the small sacrifices. It always has been.
 |
| Alain Delon and Monica Vitti |
L'Eclisse (The Eclipse) is regarded as the
last part of a trilogy preceded by L'Avventura (1960) and La Notte
(1961) - all are essays on modernism, architecture, politics and communication:
the spaces between people with the greatest gulf being between men and women.
All feature Monica Vitti, an actress with supernatural levels of expression,
who can deliver the most impenetrable depths even as she smiles a look of uncertain
love.
You don’t have to watch these films through chic
horned-rim glasses stroking bearded chin, dressed in pressed white lined shirts
and the finest Armani – although it does help. They operate as puzzles for the
ages and were so ground-breaking that we now cannot help but view them through
the prism of their influence. Directors from Goddard to Scorsese have lauded
Antonioni as perhaps the father of modern European cinema: the man who, as he
claimed, took the bicycles out of neo-realism and mixed the sensibilities of
documentary filmmaking with innovative narratives focused on the cultural
tipping point of the early sixties when concrete and deadly technology had
turned post war Europe into a society whose progression was built on
philosophical quicksand: instinct left behind by innovation.
L'Eclisse is divided into segments beginning and
ending with endings that may well be beginnings; two very “cinematic” sequences
that play with expectation and context as Monica Vitti’s Vittoria, searches for
a valid relationship with modern masculinity set adrift by a culture in flux. Vitti
was Antonioni’s partner at the time and you can only wonder what their weekends
were like… Their relationship went back to Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957)
for which the Vitti voiced the character Dorian Gray, Michelangelo surprised
her in the dubbing booth one day by telling her she had a beautiful neck and
should be in the movies… the silver-haired, silver-tongued charmer!
“Other male directors have adopted the point of view
of a female character, but none has made a woman his surrogate in the way that
Antonioni has Monica Vitti.”
So writes Gilberto Perez in his Criterion essay, L’Eclisse:
Antonioni and Vitti (see below) and he presents a good argument for the director and
actresses’ intimacy informing their work in this film. Antonioni may have been
unfairly described by Bergman as an “amateur” but his films are less about
conventional stories Ingmar, and more about the uncertainties of the characters
to whom things may happen. He’s the Miles Davis to Bergman’s Dave Brubeck… both
“modern” but with one more interested in the spaces between the notes than the
precision of his playing. In Monica Vitti he found a performer who could
inhabit those spaces and define them with even more uncertainty. Bergman miss-read that too...
The opening sees Vittoria finishing with her long-term
partner Riccardo (Spanish actor Francisco Rabal) after an agonised all-night
attempt to talk it over… The characters are shown at exhausted angles as they
move awkwardly around the room, like caged animals tortured by incomprehension
at their own captivity. Riccardo’s apartment is packed full of modern art,
books and aesthetic artifice but is there a genuine connection with his possessions?
 |
| Breaking up is hard to do. |
Vittoria looks through a frame and pulls out a trinket
the viewer may have seen as part of a picture: but it’s not real just an
illusion. The house is on a new estate on the edge of Rome – all manicured
lawns and quiet, ordered streets – the future of bourgeois living yet
overlooked by a menacing water tower that has the slightest echoes of the
mushroom clouds so threatening the World order at the time: the age of
accumulated anxiety.
Vittoria escapes the attentions of her new ex and goes to
find her mother in Rome’s stock exchange - the Borsa. Milan was and is the main
exchange in Italy but the Roman version was favoured by smaller investors.
Antonioni shot over the weekend with a good many stockbrokers guesting as
extras for authenticity… their work all sweaty, panicked shouting for an edge
in an exchange where values may shift at the slightest rumour, miss-calculation
or pronouncement from a trusted source.
 |
| At the Borsa with Mum, watching the money go. |
Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) is a well-off widow
addicted to the thrill of playing the stocks and is far too excited about her
latest gains to listen to her daughter’s story. She uses an energetic young
broker Piero (Alain Delon) to place her “bets” and he doesn’t seem to let her
or any of his customers down so totally focused is he on winning in this
frenetic, animalistic environment built, as it so happens, on the site of a
pagan Roman temple with ancient columns still visible in this monument to
modern greed.
Vittoria returns home and is greeted by her friend Anita
(Rosanna Rory) the wife of a pilot who is away collecting a new plane. They
drink and then join their new neighbour, Marta (Mirella Ricciardi) recently
returned from living in Kenya. This section has perhaps the most specific
meaning of any in the film as the colonial life is examined and Vittoria ends
up in black face dressed and dancing as an African maid: uncomfortable viewing
to modern eyes but pointedly so given Marta’s reference to Africans as
“monkeys”, something Vittoria gently takes her to task on.
 |
| Mirella Riccadi, Monica Vitti and Rosanna Rory |
Their party is disturbed after Marta’s dog escapes and
they race out into the darkness to find it along with several others running
free. Vittoria finds the poodle but then is distracted by the sounds of the
wind blowing through the ropes of flag poles – like a child she retains a
fascination with the unexpected: an almost musical noise gently pushing through
the night stillness.
Vittoria flies with Anita and her husband over to Verona
for another interlude. As she wanders the airfield taking in the unfamiliarity,
she passes two African men sitting outside a café: nothing happens in the film
by accident.
The scene shifts abruptly back to Rome as the stock
market takes centre stage and we learn more of Piero. There’s a black day on
the markets across Italy and Vittoria’s mother is not alone in losing millions
of Lira. Piero is at the centre of things trying to limit the damage and secure
his company’s clients for the recovery. There are dark mutterings about the
market being rigged, political influencers and insider trading… this is Piero’s
world and Antonioni doesn’t like it.
 |
| Millions of Lira lost, the man takes a tranquilizer and draws flowers... |
Fascinated by one man’s reaction to his huge losses,
Vittoria is drawn into events and from there to Piero. They begin a
relationship but it’s a faltering one: they cannot seem to match their pace… He
takes Vittoria to his family home and she is almost shocked by the display of
art on show: either it’s too much conspicuous consumption or she cannot
reconcile this cultural background with Piero’s fiscal amorality.
Piero is lightning quick at calculating opportunities on
the markets but he can’t “play” Vittoria and can't absorb her fluctuations in
the way he can company data. For her part, Vittoria doesn’t understand his
fascination with making money… she’s more interested in working out the world
around her and – at the very least – finding something different, something
real?
 |
| Vittoria is unsettled by Piero's family wealth |
The relationship the two develop is stop-start in the
most heartbreakingly familiar of ways… they’re struggling to connect even
though the chemistry is right – Delon and Vitti!? – but too often Vittoria
slips from Piero’s embrace as he tries for confirmation of her feeling through
physical contact. Vittoria is a woman fresh from one unfulfilling relationship
and here we see someone unwilling to make the same mistake on the rebound.
Gradually Vittoria is being persuaded and we assume we
know how this all ends but, as with Piero, are constantly put on our guard by
Vittoria’s uncertainty. No lo so… is a phrase she utters so often at one point
Piero tells her not to say she doesn’t know in answer to his questioning but
she can’t tell him what is lacking or what she wants.
 |
| The male gaze... Alain Delon |
Spoilers in the next paragraph!
By the end their words mean literally nothing and they engage
in a farewell that has all of the right words – see you tonight, every night –
with all intention adrift. Having agreed
to meet once more at their regular meeting place, we wait for some six minutes
for them to turn up as Antonioni focuses on the finer details, the water butt –
now burst open and flooding the pavement – the building works, the regular passers-by
– the nurse with baby – as the city makes its way oblivious to the significance
of the empty space on the corner of the street and of the unbridgeable gaps in
human understanding: the spaces between us all.
Antonioni regular, Gianni Di Venanzo, provides superb cinematography
and allied to the director’s choice of locations presents an other-worldly view
of a progressive Italy that still looks modern half a century later. These new
suburban vistas are almost empty and with nary a car in sight whilst near
silence provides an almost ever-present soundtrack to Vittoria’s un-spoken
reconnaissance as she slowly walks the streets.
Vitti’s self-control is supreme (sorry Mr Bergman) and
she manages to convey so much with expressive economy – her face a picture of
studied neutrality and her eyes giving away only the possibilities of her
thoughts. By contrast Delon’s Piero is impulsive and cock-sure: the unreality
of monetary gain being its own reward: an end unto itself and the irrational
refuge of many a modern careerist.
I’m not sure if L’Ecclise ranks higher than L’Avventura
or La Notte but my response evolves with each viewing, especially on
that big screen. This is not just the director’s knack for avoiding too much
narrative certainty but also the immense detail in his work and its enduring
integrity. This week I watched the film and my certainties shifted in new ways…
that’s the wonder of cinema!
L'Eclisse is showing again on 5th and 15th June - details of that and all the new BFI programmes can be found on their
website. See you there!
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