L'Eclisse

Monica Vitti listens to the wind rustling through the trees in L'Eclisse

Like Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse verges on being a parody of European art cinema. The feeling of alienation is overdetermined. Rome in L'Eclisse is evocative of the grids and angular shapes of Mondrian, De Chirico and Hopper. The coda of the film, where Antonioni deconstructs the settings without a dramatic context, feels like he is goading us with alienation effects.

However, even when the world surrounding the characters of L'Eclisse reflects alienation, it also conveys a striving for transcendence. As in Blow Up, the sight and sound of wind rustling through the trees creates a feeling of spiritual calm amidst the turmoil of the modern world. Monica Vitti's Vittoria is attuned to this. She wanders through space looking for a spiritual companion. She only finds heels.

Specifically, Alain Delon as Pietro, a stock trader on the make. Always well cast as slick and superficial, Delon is a suitably beautiful object of Vittoria's desire. The spiritually yearning Vittoria is drawn to her opposite, an opportunistic materialist. She is suitably ambivalent towards her attraction, both turned on and revulsed. The few happy love scenes between the two are unconvincing. Antonioni does not do happy.

He is more in his wheelhouse with the tumult of the stock market floor. The Marxist side of Antonioni is indulged here and the frantic gyrations of the market floor are ideal fodder for a lampoon of capitalism. Scenes of Delon with his coworkers drag, though. They lack the buoyant Vitti, who is the light at the end of the tunnel of this film. Similarly, the opening sequence where Vittoria ambivalently dumps her fiance, Rodrigo, is monotonous. Despite interesting decor and window views to gaze upon, the audience knows that Rodrigo has no chance with Vittoria and that Mr. Delon will pop up in the next reel. The sequence is superfluous, as is an aerial sequence exposing the indolence of the Italian rich.

L'Eclisse, though, is a movie that truly moves, following packs of dogs and other creatures around urban corners and squares. "You never stand still," Vittoria tells Pietro and that is because he is a shark. The characters in l'Eclisse are in constant motion because they are busy trying on identities. Most obviously in the blackface section ("Let's stop playing negroes." a character says) which I found more gauche than objectionable. The world of L'Eclisse and the relationships in it are defined only by the fickle laws of relativism.

Antonioni's despair seems shallow and mannerist, but L'Eclisse is suffused with meaning. Antonioni stresses the need for romantic play amidst modern alienation. This is a film filled with ideas, if not always common sense.