a tear is the fault of the dress
by Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo
Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, and Ottiero Ottieri (writers),
Michelangel Antonioni (director) L‘Eclisse
(Eclipse) / 1962
If
watching Antonioni’s great films L’Avventura
(see My Year 2007) and La
Notte did not make it clear, then Eclipse
of 1962 certainly reiterates that this director’s films are not at all
about narrative fiction. Plot truly does not matter, and the events of his
films might often be somewhat shuffled. His films, rather, are psychological
expressions—so psychological that Antonioni might almost have been a
surrealist, had he not chosen to use what appears as or pretends to be a
realist world instead of employing dream-like surrealist images. Even Antonioni’s
rooms in these three films are mirrors of the owner’s personalities rather than
places to be actually inhabited.
Time and again, the characters move into
spaces where the owners have gone missing. Landscapes generally are empty and
barren as in L’Avventura, or are pockmarked with the detritus of
civilization, half-developed fields littered with preposterous constructions
such as the mushroom-shaped water tower early in Eclipse or the seemingly never-to-be-completed new building near
her own street. The characters, in turn, move around these spaces as if they
are, in fact, sleepwalkers.
As the first long sequence of Eclipse, for example, Monica Vitti as
Vittoria wanders backwards and forwards in and out of rooms while her lover
Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) sits for long periods of time as if he were a
statue. She smokes, drinks, and rearranges nearby objects, unable to properly
express her intense emotions, while Riccardo serves as kind of Buddha, a figure
mirrored by the nearby whirling fan, both frozen in the repetition of nothingness.
No matter what has happened previously, we know the clash between the two is irreclaimable.
He is a publisher, a man of books, she a creature unable to express her mind.
The director’s camera, almost mimicking
Vittoria’s fidgety movements, darts around the same space, fragmenting
furniture and faces, at moments moving to her legs beneath a chair before
zooming up to a mirror or peering out, as she herself has a few seconds before,
from the corner of a window. It is almost as if everything is moving in a languorous
ballet, choreographed to express the uncertainty and awkwardness of the human
beings within. Indeed it is this quite careful manipulation of movement that
brings many viewers to describe Antonioni’s filmmaking as “mannered.” And in
some senses, they are correct in their evaluation, for the entire scene an
expression “in the manner” of what we pretend are real experiences, but which,
in truth, appear as something more out of Kabuki than our real everyday actions.
Yet perhaps they reveal those everyday actions more faithfully than we might
have ever imagined.
Antonioni, however, is not attempting to
express the everyday, and never pretends to be. His “characters,” as beautiful
as they are, represent little more than stick figures, pushed and pulled
through their daily actions by the rising industrialism, politics, greed, and, yes
always, love without being able to solidly take hold of anything. They seldom
make choices, and, even when they do, they are generally mistaken ones. For
that reason none of them will find what we might call satisfaction.
Leaving her long-time elder lover,
Vittoria is like a straw in the wind, her willowy body and diaphanous hair
insubstantiality tilting against the city backdrops, a sun ready to be blotted
out the bold black-and-white world in which she lives. She is obviously a figure of the wind, as her
brief, exhilarating airplane trip through the clouds with her neighbor and her
pilot husband reveal. Vittoria is clearly overwhelmed by the experience.
Yet there is also a kind of primitiveness
about her, as her sudden determination to imitate a dancing Kenyan native in
the apartment of her new acquaintance from Kenya reveals. But the same act also
tells us that she has no comprehension of politics or even the dangerous
implications of her spontaneous acts. Her friend Anita is quickly irritated by
and embarrassed for her racist, “negro” mockery.
Time and again, Vittoria shifts in her
tracks at the very moment she might actually be moving toward a destination.
Suddenly while trying to track down her new Kenyan friend’s escaped dog, she is
distracted by the sounds of poles blowing in the wind. Leaving the stock
exchange after an awful day in which her stock-playing mother has lost a great
deal of money, Vittoria follows an even bigger loser, who appears to possibly
be contemplating suicide, only to discover a napkin on which he has drawn
several flowers. Vitti almost literally floats through the Rome of Antonioni’s Eclipse.
Only one “thing,” after her breakup with
Riccardo, seems to temporarily catch her attention or offer even a location
where she might briefly settle: the beautiful face and fierce intensity of
motion she perceives in the stock trader Piero (Alain Delon). With his dark
hair and long, almost two feline eyebrows, Piero is exactly the opposite of Vittoria. If she wanders, he
moves with the direct intention of a man who knows what he wants and generally
gets it. The scenes of him and his peers at the stock exchange represent humans
as a pack of lions frenetically pacing back and forth between the phone
cubicles, from where they get orders and glean information from other stock
exchanges, and the bidding circle, where they shout out their stock purchases
like desperately growling predators—which indeed they are! Money is an entry to
the game played by those who hate and fear their fellow kind, a slightly
paranoid reality expressed by Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) as well.
The first moment this man of purposeless action
spots Vittoria, it is inevitable, as so much is in Antonioni’s world of
coincidence, that he will stalk her. The very same day, Piero throws over his
call girl friend (a former blonde who has just changed into a brunette) and
paces back and forth between Vittoria’s window, only to have his Alfa Romeo
stolen by a stumbling drunk.
His reaction to the discovery of the car,
the body of the drunk within in, further emphasizes the differences between
them. From a poorer family, Vittoria has no interest in finances, while he, the
son of an obviously wealthy Roman family—who grew up in a house, we later
discover, filled with great art and expensive furniture—excitedly uses others
to make even more money and buy more possessions. He’ll sell the Alpha Romeo,
he boasts, for a better and newer car. Even a stolen kiss between them ends
with Vittoria’s torn dress. Her passive answer: “A tear is the dresses’ fault.”
We recognize that nothing can come of
their explosive relationship, which ends in Piero’s office, where he has
temporarily removed all the phones from their cradles in order not to be
disturbed.
As all lovers do, they promise to meet
again that night, and the night after, until the end of time. But as Vittoria
descends the stairs to leave, for a second turning to look back to what we know
has become a pillar of salt, we can only doubt their promises.
Antonioni ends his Kabuki show, once again,
with—from a realist perspective— an apparently mannerist conceit; but through
the dream perspective of this nightmare
vision of a world where humans increasingly feel dissociated, alienated, and
displaced from each other and the world around them, he quite brilliantly
conveys, his major, and perhaps only theme. Through a series of quick montages
of various hours of the day from sunrise to sunset, the director takes us to
all the spots where the couple has previously encountered one another.
Strangers pass through the streets, going about their business, but neither
Piero nor Vittoria show up. They too, like the unoccupied rooms and spaces they
have throughout the film entered and wandered away from, no longer exist for
one another. And even if they might ever come seeking each other out, there
will surely be no one at home.
Los Angeles,
January 2, 2011
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