Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Written by Michelangelo Antonioni, Giorgio Bassani, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Diego Fabbri, Roger Nimier, Turi Vasile
Italy/France, 1953
In 1953, Michelangelo Antonioni directed the episodic I vinti (The Vanquished),
quite possibly the least “Antonioni-esque” feature he ever made (the
roster of credited writers above is some indication of the impersonal
nature of the film). Comprised of three vignettes about troubled youth
in France, Italy, and England, the film at times comes across almost as a
moralizing after school special, whereby it attempts to draw attention
to the desperate and destructive state of young people during this
period. But while the film’s obvious didacticism is its least laudable
characteristic, I vinti is nevertheless a fascinating examination of this “burnt out generation.”
These
young people were just children during World War II. They’ve grown up
in a time of upheaval and violence, and now as society has progressed
and begun to stabilize, they vainly cope with a new post-war modernity.
They act out in this violent world by committing their own acts of
violence, sometimes for egotistical achievement, sometimes for ideology,
sometimes out of sheer greed or boredom. The youth are blinded by a
mentality of personal gain and selfishness, which is further blurred by
political and social conditioning. They paradoxically seek an adult form
of independence, but are in many ways reliant upon, and restrained by, a
familial and collective trust. The parents in the film, as well as the
film’s opening narration, seek to pin down the aggressive behavior,
attributing their misdeeds to factors ranging from gangster films to
“boogie-woogie” music.
The
three stories were ripped from the headlines, and their subsequent
adherence to what really happened was the cause of considerable acrimony
when the film came out, not only from the families of those involved,
but also from various sociopolitical factions. The Italian episode in
particular was subject to censorial demands and alterations. However, it
is presented uncut in the new Blu-ray of the film. This release also
includes interviews with actor Franco Interlenghi (from the Italian
segment) and writer/producer Turi Vasile, each sharing some background
on the production along with their personal recollections. There is also
Tentato Suicidio, Antonioni’s contribution to the omnibus feature Love in the City, which itself will be released on Blu-ray July 22.
The first segment of I vinti
is set in France and revolves around a group of young people who decide
to kill one of their supposed friends. The violent act is all part of
their general preoccupation with doing something simply for the hell of
it, ignorant of any potential repercussions. Many are only concerned
with good times and a worldly life of wealth. Their cruel ambitions lead
them to the countryside, an ironically idyllic backdrop for the murder.
The second portion of the film, the controversial Italian episode, has
its main protagonist acting out for ideological purposes, his confused
politics matching his youthful heedlessness. This segment seems
especially born of World War II’s aftermath, with a focus on the black
market that was then something of a necessity and is now a more
stringently patrolled offense. Finally, the English segment concerns a
young writer who for his own whimsy, and later publicity, kills an aged
prostitute and toys with the police as they conduct their investigation.
Widely considered the best of the three segments (Vasile says it also
illustrates “Antonioni’s Anglo-Saxon bent” that would emerge in Blow-Up), this story is the most enduringly relevant, with contemporary media more obsessed than ever over self-made stars and scandal.
While
Antonioni’s work frequently focuses on the role ambiguous emotions play
in defining characters and their actions, this is one of his few films
where motivation is derived more overtly from political and economic
foundations. I vinti expressly stresses the fluctuating times
as being a catalyst for these lives of misdirection. Similarly, the use
of location in this film, an otherwise key facet of Antonioni’s
methodology, serves essentially no more a purpose than being where the
action happens to take place, aesthetically reflecting or suggesting
little about the characters and their decisions.
Such a cinematic assessment of these troubling concerns was prevalent in Italy during this time (see Fellini’s I Vitelloni of the same year, with its assortment of aimless layabouts, or, later, Pasolini’s Accattone). But part of the point of I vinti,
with its Europe-spanning division, is the universality of these issues:
the inflated value of effortlessly earned money, the disdain for hard
work, the obsession over celebrity and sensationalism, and the complex
youthful desire for self-determination. Still, despite its diverse
settings, one can’t help but think of Italian cinema in particular while
watching the film, and not just because of its director. In many ways, I vinti represents what happened to characters like young Bruno in Bicycle Thieves or the world-weary children in Paisan, as they make their way to the self-indulgence of Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita. I vinti is perhaps what comes between.
REVIEW from SOUND ON SIGHT
Max Ophüls’ third feature in America, Caught,
from 1949, is an evocative amalgam of a domesticated melodramatic
tragedy and a dynamic film noir sensibility. The picture stars Barbara
Bel Geddes as Leonora Eames, a studious adherent to charm school
principles who dreams of becoming a glamorous model, or at least
marrying a young, handsome millionaire. She gets the latter when she
meets Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), a wealthy “international something”
who gives her the superficial materials she desires but little else.
Their marriage is an arduous sham. He works late hours on unclear
projects while she is left to dwell uselessly in their extravagant
mansion. He’s cruel to her and careless. A way out of the stifling
relationship comes in the form of a job as a doctor’s receptionist.
Leonora leaves Ohlrig and moves into Manhattan, where she eventually
shows a knack for her newfound profession. There she also falls for
pediatrician Larry Quinada (James Mason, in his first Hollywood role).
As the film’s title suggests, Leonora finds herself emotionally and
ethically caught: caught between who she is and what she tried to be,
and what she’s become and what she now hopes for. A confrontation is
inevitable, but what isn’t expected is the shocking conclusion of the
film. A forbidding decision provocatively questions the morals of these
characters and our subsequent judgment of their actions, and the final
minutes of the film contains the makings of one of Hollywood’s most
bizarre “happy endings.”
The
Dorothy Dale School of Charm gives Leonora a superficial “social
education,” where she learns diction and posture and how to handle
herself when out and about with society’s elites. It’s on her way to a
swanky yacht party that she meets Ohlrig. He’s heard before he’s seen,
as he’s below the pier and out of her and our view. Such an introduction
foreshadows their marriage, itself marred by each of them being out of
sight and out of mind. She is suspicious about his invitation to ride
with him — men, after all, have only one idea — and he is vague about
who he is and where he’s going. After this first meeting, they continue
seeing each other, despite apparent coldness and tension. He thinks
she’s only after his money, but they marry anyway. (Admittedly, in the
beginning, though she doesn’t always have money for lunch, she does
dream of mink and chinchilla.)
With
the settings of their initial meeting being a foggy pier and outside a
dimly lit warehouse, our noir sixth sense tells us things are not going
to go well for this romance. Once married, Leonora clearly doesn’t fit
in her new life, and we never feel satisfied either. Her anxiety feeds
our own trepidation about what she’s gotten herself into. Ohlrig’s large
house feels paradoxically more claustrophobic than her old, cramped
apartment. It has an empty fullness, reminiscent of Charles Foster
Kane’s Xanadu. She complains she never sees her husband and he counters
with insinuations: “You got what you wanted,” he tells her, obviously
still under the impression she is after his wealth, “You’re wearing it.”
She’s a wreck, and he’s insecure, careless, and irrationally explosive.
Her charm school pretense couldn’t have prepared her for this.
When
she finally gets the nerve to leave and meets Larry, it’s a different
world. He and his partner are in over their heads with their busy
practice. It’s in a rather poor section of the city; it’s hectic and not
at all glamorous. But there’s life there, and indeed, life there soon
shall be. Larry initially criticizes Leonora for being too fancy, but
their mutual attraction grows more and more pronounced, just as she
discovers she’s pregnant … with Ohlrig’s child. She now faces compassion
or coldness, secrets or the truth, divorce or a child.
Romantic passions run high throughout Caught,
yet all three leads reign in any overtly theatrical excess, maintaining
a balanced degree of emotional expressiveness even in times of
scandalous behavior. There is also a significant level of socioeconomic
concern, which drives a considerable portion of the drama. The genuine
or perceived importance of money is related throughout, and the
placement of an individual comfortably into an appropriate class is but
one conveyed anxiety, at least for Leonora, with Ohlrig and Larry
representing opposite poles of economic standing.
Ophüls’
renowned camera work is on full display (it was while working on this
film that Mason penned an amusing poem regarding, “A shot that does not
call for tracks” being “agony for poor old Max”). Even in Leonora’s
constrictive apartment early on, or later in Larry’s office, the camera
glides in all directions, in continually impressive and original
patterns. One particularly striking shot has the two doctors talking to
each other from across the office. The camera establishes a central
focal point and as if a pendulum, it oscillates from side to side,
resting on either man in matching compositions. What also stands out
visually is the meticulousness of formal design in terms of
corresponding cuts, noirish illumination, deep focus compositions, and
the movement of characters in and out of frame, all of this lending
itself to a notable cinematic choreography beyond just moving the
camera.
Caught’s screenplay is by Arthur Laurents, who had the year before written Hitchcock’s Rope and would go on to pen David Lean’s Summertime (1955) and Otto Preminger’s underrated Bonjour Tristesse (1958). As for Ophüls, as good as Caught is, his greatest work still lay ahead: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de… (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).
REVIEW from SOUND ON SIGHT
L’eclisse is the third film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s so-called “Trilogy of Alienation,” the preceding works having been L’avventura and La notte. (With justification, some would argue that Red Desert,
his next film, truly rounds out what would then be considered a
tetralogy). While the three films taken together do explore many of the
same themes relating to spiritual emptiness, the disbanding of
relationships, and a struggle to communicate in an increasingly modern
and alienating world, L’eclisse differs from the two earlier
works most notably in its increasingly experimental style and its
blatant departures from conventional storytelling and formal design.
A tumultuous relationship begins L’eclisse,
as we arrive in medias res, near the end of the rather unpleasantly
crumbling relationship between Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) and Vittoria
(Monica Vitti). Inside Riccardo’s claustrophobic home, Antonioni packs
the frame in a remarkable fashion, with furniture, accessories, and
pieces of miscellaneous bric-a-brac invading and protruding through
nearly every corner of any given composition. Coupled with a deafening
silence (“Many things can be said during silence,” Antonioni once said)
and a stifling atmosphere (an oscillating fan stresses the suffocating
warmth), this creates an intimately uncomfortable portrait of an affair
in ruins, of things clearly having taken a turn for the worse. Vittoria
fidgets around anxiously; Riccardo at times just sits and stares. While
he is persistent in his attempts at reconciliation, there seems to be no
hope. Whatever existed between these two has been sadly severed.
Isolation
is a key theme in Antonioni’s work, highlighted frequently through the
use of location. Here, after Vittoria leaves Riccardo’s home, she walks
along the desolate streets. It’s early and there is barely anyone else
around. In this setting, Vittoria’s solitude is underlined by her
isolated figure placed in these sterile surroundings. This would stand
in contrast to the next key location of the film, one unlike any other
previously approached by Antonioni in his films to this point — the
Italian stock exchange, where Piero (Alain Delon), who is soon to be
Vittoria’s new love, works. This is a hectic, crowded, and noisy
location, one of bustling energy that relates to, and feeds off of, the
individuals who make up this trade; as they yell and bid and curse, one
wonders if they are spurring on this confusion and chaos, or if it the
other way around. Either way, this particular locale is quite revealing,
not only as far as the characters are concerned, but here we also see
Antonioni making a larger commentary on this specific venue as part of
Italy as a whole. Men and women shout over each other and violence is
primed to erupt at any moment. There is much at stake here, and the
attempts to make deals and sell and buy stocks are complicated by all
the noise. The earlier silence between Riccardo and Vittoria, which
makes their dialogue strained, is paralleled here where the raucousness
makes attempts at communication also a struggle. This exchange of
currency and property seems utterly uncivilized, yet modern civilization
as these people know it is heavily dependent on what goes on in this
site. It’s a kind of post-war, consumerist, capitalistic paradox, where
big business and stock traders are made to appear unscrupulous and
overly aggressive, but are, in many ways, what makes the whole thing
move. In a strategy at this point rare in his career, Antonioni is using
the market location as instigation for a larger societal critique. When
Piero and his associates observe a moment of silence to remember a
recently deceased colleague, the anxiety of missing out on potential
money earned is excruciating. “One minute here costs billions,” Piero
tells Vittoria.
L’eclisse
would go on to make use of a location only existing in photographs to
further comment on the personal struggles of these characters in their
contemporary existence. Following the break up with Riccardo, Vittoria
later that evening finds herself in the home of a neighbor, essentially a
stranger. There, she marvels at the pictures and artifacts taken from
this neighbor’s time spent in Africa. Though never actually in this
geographic location, the way the images of the exotic land work on
Vittoria’s psyche is nevertheless revealing. She loosens up and becomes
uninhibited, going so far as to don blackface, wear a robe, and yell and
hop around in the apparent fashion of an “African savage.” What may
seem like blatant racism now (and the neighbor seems to view the
behavior as disrespectful at the very least), in the film it signals a
change in behavior and mentality that Vittoria otherwise never finds the
motivation for. The pictures of the African landscapes inform
considerably, even if briefly, a retreat from her suffocating, banal,
and, to her, difficult way of life. Kenya represents freedom, an escape
from modernity, a less difficult place where “things just unfold on
their own.”
In
another example of an alternate environment playing a part in character
development, a major location for Piero also reveals a perhaps latent
desire for a return to a simpler existence, here a return to the past.
Despite his role in an ever enveloping and evolving contemporary
lifestyle, Piero lives in a house populated by antiques. Though he is in
no way old fashioned, and actually seems to revel in modern times with
the emphasis on prosperity, speed, and progress, these relics
surrounding him in this domestic setting hint at a man who once was, or
still is, a product of a totally different life than what he is leading.
Taking
these two locations together, they both demonstrate why Piero and
Vittoria may indeed make a suitable couple — neither are seemingly
content with where they are in life or in setting; both maybe even feel
more at home, literally and figuratively, in spaces not inundated by the
complexities, falsities, and artificialities of a modern reality. If
they are a good match, however, then how does one explain the film’s
famous final sequence, which amounts to, as Seymour Chatman has
described it, “a kind of disestablishing shot”?
Having
agreed to meet later one evening, neither character shows, and
Antonioni’s camera is left to comb the area and its animate and
inanimate occupiers. A sequence lasting nearly seven minutes provides
one of Antonioni’s most stunning moments of landscape examination and
ambiguous narrative provocation. Abstract compositions of spatial
elements — people, buildings, trees, debris, etc. — give a sense of
disturbing estrangement. We see people waiting, watching, walking … but
waiting for what, watching what, walking where? It’s an aimless, dreamy,
even haunting montage of incongruous features. In Elements of Landscape, a short documentary featured on the Criterion Collection disc, critic Adriano Aprà likens L’eclisse
to a science fiction film, particularly with its odd, ultramodern
architecture, and at one point, Piero states that he feels like he’s in a
foreign country. Throughout the entire film, there is a strong feeling
of strangeness, but never more so than in this final sequence. The
evocative imagery and Giovanni Fusco’s tremendously effective ambient
score suggests an alarming finality, but to what? A newspaper headline
mentions the nuclear arms race. A possible clue? Antonioni’s
compositions in and of themselves are normal enough (stunningly shot
though — Aprà calls the filmmaker a “photographer/director”), but taken
together like they are here, and juxtaposed in their content and form,
the result is quite unsettling.
And
what of Piero and Vittoria? Why are they together prior to this, and
where are they now? It’s clear when they first meet that there is an
attraction (it’s Monica Vitti and Alain Delon, how could there not be
attraction?), but their initial attempts at physical affection are
awkward at best. This improves some as the film goes on, but there is
never a hint of true devotion. Vittoria says at one point she wishes she
didn’t love him, but then she wonders if she wishes she loved him more.
Their union is half-hearted from the start. Neither is reliant on the
other for security, nor are they necessarily looking for commitment.
Unexpressed ambivalence is not unusual for Antonioni’s couples, but the
way their relationship concludes here, at least as far as what we
actually see in the film, is an innovative approach. By agreeing on the
meeting time and location, and neither showing, we are at once not
surprised (did they really care for each other anyway) and shocked
(because we stay in the area, without them, for so long).
There has been debate about what exactly L’eclisse is referring to. There is no actual eclipse in the picture, so like Red Desert,
which features nothing close to a desert, to say nothing of a red one,
one has to assume that the title is illusory or metaphoric. In this
case, it would seem that there is actually an eclipse of sorts, but it’s
one of the landscape over the characters. The setting in this film has
become so important that it now outweighs our protagonists. From
Riccardo’s home to the stock exchange to the austere streets,
Antonioni’s characters are never quite in a place where they seem fully
at ease. And by the end, why haven’t Piero and Vittoria met? Where could
they be? It’s ultimately inconsequential, because the surroundings have
taken center stage. In Antonioni’s work to this point, going as far
back as his first documentary, People of the Po, settings have
told a great deal about their inhabitants. But now, it seems people are
losing their relevance. This is just one facet of L’eclisse, a film that truly rewards, if not demands, multiple viewings.
REVIEW from SOUND ON SIGHT
