a tear is
the fault of the dress
by Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra,
Elio Bartolini, and Ottiero Ottieri (writers), Michelangelo Antonioni (director)
L‘Eclisse (Eclipse) / 1962
If watching Antonioni’s great films L’Avventura 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 owners’ 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 the female character’s
street. The characters, in turn, move around these spaces as if they are, in
fact, sleepwalkers.
In 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 and
the words within them, 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. 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 is 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 too 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
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2011).
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