L'Eclisse

L'Eclisse (1962) is admirable, obtuse, and, ultimately, tedious.  It's Antonioni's most characteristic work and its qualities are intrinsic to all of the director's work after L'Avventura.  The film is about things that don't happen:  conceptually, making a movie about nothing, that is, an event, or events, that don't occur seems daring and ingenious.  But, in actual practice, the concept is too thin to sustain a movie that is 125 minutes long -- you can dramatize non-events, it seems, a lot more efficiently; I think an hour would suffice.  One has the sense that Antonioni is treading water -- filling up time with make-shift improvisation to expand the vignette into an evening-length film.  Antonioni is too deliberate a film maker to improvise successfully and the film hasn't aged well -- in fact, some of the movie is obnoxious nonsense.  To pad out the picture, the director gives his heroine two chums.  As an old school Italian, Antonioni has no idea how women talk among themselves -- it seems it's something he has never seriously considered.  Therefore, the scenes in which the women interact are seriously errant -- he seems to perceive the girls as bubble-headed children.  They don't really converse but, rather, play together like precocious children.  It's wholly unconvincing and, further, strays down some curious paths.  One of the women is from Kenya and has an apartment decorated surrealistically with hunting rifles and images of Africa.  (She reminds me of some of the women-warriors in old Laurel and Hardy movies.)  To amuse themselves, the women play drum music on a phonograph and Monica Vitti corks up, painting herself to appear in black face with pale lipstick exaggerating her lips.  She jumps around, thrusting out her ass, and wiggling while making war-like gestures with a spear.  Finally, someone tires of the charade and says:  "Let's stop playing Negroes."  The film is nothing, if not, exhaustive:  Antonioni tours the apartments of his four principal characters and takes care to show us where the heroine and her romantic interest slept when they were children.  His camera lingers lovingly on weird Modernist buildings and eerie-looking construction sites and he stages lengthy scenes in the Roman stock market that make their point in about 45 seconds and, then, go one for 20 minutes.  At one point, the heroine goes with one of her chums on a light prop-driven plane flight to Verona.  It's as aimless as the rest of the scenes in which Antonioni is just killing time.  At the little airport cafe, two Black men sit impassively in the shade, scarcely moving their eyes let alone their bodies and faces -- it's subtly, but distinctly, racist.  An American glances at Monica Vitti, asks her to have a beer with him, and, then, shrugs in the mildest disappointment when she declines.  The women get back on the Cessna and fly back to Rome.  Nothing is accomplished, but, then, Antonioni's movie is about things that don't happen and, therefore, this is par for the course.

It's a hot morning in a desolate Roman suburb -- huge empty streets, science-fiction architecture, veiled construction sites, in short de Chirico updated and with Brutalist architecture.  A woman (Monica Vitti) argues with her boyfriend and they agree to separate.  They have been arguing all night.  Antonioni loving details the man's apartment and the action has at its fulcrum a rotating electric fan.  The woman goes to the stock exchange and meets her mother who has become an avid trader.  She encounters a handsome stock broker played by Alain Delon.  There's more aimless activity.  The next day, the stock market crashes and people lose millions of dollars.  We find out that the stock broker is working for the woman's mother.  Antonioni lovingly details the woman's apartment -- she works as a translator.  The woman goes home to her mother's apartment.  Antonioni lovingly details the mother's dwelling.  The stock broker is interested in the woman and makes overtures to her.  While the two are chatting -- she's on her balcony and the scene is a perverse, passion-less iteration of a similar balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (set in Verona) -- an elegant-looking drunk wanders by.  The drunk ambles down the block and steals the stockbroker's sports car.  The next day, the car  fished out of the Tiber River with the dead drunk still behind the wheel.  The woman meets the stockbroker at the river's edge who callously says that the drunk dented his car and that he will have to get another.  The two repair to the Stockbroker's home -- it's an old dark place inherited from his parents:  of course, Antonioni lovingly details the place showing us its pictures, furniture, and the views from its windows.  The couple engage in some nonchalant fondling.  Then, they go to the stockbroker's office, apparently, closed for the weekend.  They get down to some more serious love-making in this office suite -- the stockbroker has thoughtfully taken all the phones off the hook.  When one of the doorbell rings, however, the tryst is interrupted.  The couple walk around the deserted streets of suburban Rome and agree to meet that night at their appointed place of assignation -- it's the corner of a big, sinister-looking construction site where there is an enigmatic barrel full of rain water next to some dark trees.  But neither one of them shows up for the date -- Antonioni lingers on the empty boulevards, anxious people waiting for buses, the vacant skies, the shadowy trees moving in the breeze, the hulking and silent construction site like some vast mausoleum, the rain barrel breached and oozing water onto the pavement and into a storm sewer, con-trails in the sky, and people on concrete balconies pointing at something off-screen.  A man reads a newspaper with a big headline about the threat of nuclear war.  The street lights come on and the horror movie music rises to a howl and the film is over.  This final sequence is lyrical, frightening, and intensely beautiful -- it's probably the best thing Antonioni ever did, but it can't make up for the vapid 100 minutes preceding the film's end.  And, even at his best, Antonioni cheapens the effect by inserting some topical headlines about nuclear war that have nothing to do with the anomie depicted in the movie.

I suppose the point is that people in the modern world have invested their passion in getting and spending money and don't really have much energy leftover for love.  The stockbroker sort of likes the woman and she sort of likes him back, but both agree (at least by missing their date) that there's no future in the relationship.  It's hard for me to see that this is particularly tragic or significant.  People have lackluster affairs all the time -- you don't always passionately love the person that you're with, but the world doesn't end as a consequence.  Antonioni wants the viewer to generalize the lack of connection between the principal characters and this is easy enough to do because there's really no one else of consequence in the movie -- but their mediocre, uncommitted non-affair isn't necessarily diagnostic of anything.  The false values depicted in the stock market scenes also don't really generalize well -- the market goes up and down.  Today's crash will be replaced by a boom tomorrow.   As the title implies, an eclipse is never permanent.  Monica Vitti gives an impressive if irritating performance -- she's mostly playful, and, even, petulant, but, at times, her face becomes an impassive mask, almost horror-struck at her own indifference.  Antonioni, like many Italian men of a certain age, can't adjust to women freed by birth control to be as nonchalant and sexually casual as men -- he views the prospect of a world filled with such creatures with undisguised terror.