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The modern girl who vanishes and is replaced, the ancient vase that's broken with a shrug, "it figures." The foundation is Rossellini's, Michelangelo Antonioni's dilation ponders Europe and its ominous, vacant spaces. "Islands, I don't get them," says the dowager aboard the yacht, voicing Shelley's complaint ("stones, stones, stones, nothing but stones!") as a gigolo's hand idly creeps under her blouse. The Roman diplomat's daughter (Lea Massari) can no longer endure "the usual uneasiness" and evaporates in the volcanic Mediterranean terrain, as simple as that. Leading the desultory search are her architect fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) and the friend (Monica Vitti) who's cursed with "the need to see everything clearly." People fade like newspaper articles, the friend's romance with the beau is a tenuous mutation fueled by anxiety and desire, a Hitchcockian switcheroo of brunettes and blondes. The progression toward the painful awareness of spiritual dislocation is a cycle of bravura cold-shoulder sequences, in which the gaps between people and time stretched become supporting characters: A socialite half-heartedly rolling in bed with an estranged lover while her friend strolls into an art gallery, a pricey moll with torn skirt luxuriating at the center of a male frenzy, a stung wife being chased around an atelier by a horny mini-Picasso. "What do you feel when you paint?" "A shudder." Continuously fusing neo-realism with science fiction, Antonioni's world is one of surfaces and emotions hardening into titanium, where communication is a set of gargantuan bells connected across wide distances by flimsy ropes. And yet, there's the romantic impulse to run after a departing train, the couple making an argument against aestheticism ("love first... then music"), the caress that lingers even if dwarfed by looming architecture and unmoved landscapes. La Notte and L'Eclisse push on with the investigation, their hope more and more frail. Cinematography by Aldo Scavarda. With Dominique Blanchar, Renzo Ricci, James Addams, Dorothy De Poliolo, and Lelio Luttazzi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |