Michelangelo Antonioni
L'Eclisse

"1962. In Florence to watch and shoot the solar eclipse. Sudden frost. Silence different from all other silences. Earthly light, unlike any other light. Then darkness, complete stillness. All I can think is that during the eclipse, feelings will probably stop as well. It's an idea vaguely related to the film I was preparing, more a feeling than an idea, but one that already defines the film when the film is still far from being defined. I should have included in the opening titles of "L'eclisse" these two verses of Dylan Thomas: "... some certainty must exist, if not to love well, at least not to love at all" Antonioni himself talks about how he imagined the solar eclipse would lead to a freezing of relationships, of love.

The film tells the story of Vittoria, an elegant bourgeois girl played by Monica Vitti, who ends a long relationship with her boyfriend because "when we met I was twenty... I was happy": it begins from an emotional swamp, an obscuring of the relationship closed in this dark, heavy, and oppressive room, a love that has nothing left to say (to his questions, Vittoria often answers "I don't know").

Accompanying her mother to the stock market, a barren bourgeois woman only interested in money, losses in the stock market, and not returning to poverty, Vittoria meets Piero, played by Alain Delon, a young stockbroker engaged in financial maneuvers without asking too many questions about life.

Vittoria tries to escape the spleen oscillating between moments of escape and happiness, like at the home of her Kenyan friend improvising a dance (the Vitti is masterful as a negra) and on the plane journey where she seems to find a harmonious and romantic relationship with reality, nature ("we enter the cloud") and emotions and between moments of estrangement and incommunicability, moments when one is alone in the midst of many, where feelings are frozen. "there are days when holding a fabric, a needle, a book, and a man is the same thing". In Antonioni's cinema spaces speak: the stock market full of people screaming, worried about getting rich, saving, strategizing no longer thinks of anything and Vittoria who is unable to be like that and in this crowd, alone among others, lost. Or certain spaces of the new Roman neighborhoods: the film is set in Rome even though we don't see the usual monuments (except once seeing a temple) so something that should be familiar is emptied of usual meanings and gains a new perspective (the same thing Fellini does in Dolce Vita and the French of the Nouvelle Vague).

These neighborhoods resemble Giorgio de Chirico's "Piazze d'Italia" (the row of illuminated poles in the dark, the building with scaffolding for the rendezvous between the two lovers or certain glimpses) and indeed have a "metaphysical effect", rendering something familiar estranging and unsettling and creating in Vittoria an anxious and melancholic but also silly gaze, like not knowing what to be, what to do. It is Italy during the economic boom of the 60s (the opening song is a twist by Mina) and Antonioni, like other directors, sees how the country is changing at a surprising speed thus also losing certain human aspects slipping towards the closing of relationships and a more technological world, where it is important to do, produce, be someone rather than stop and feel, think and love.

Between the two, appointments and encounters begin, where Vittoria escapes the existential spleen but in the meantime realizes the true nature of the boy, who is more worried about damaging the car rather than the death of the poor fellow who had taken it from him. Between the two, the discovery continues, playing around with romance (splendid the scene where while crossing a street Piero says: "when we get there I'll give you a kiss" and on the verge of kissing there is an alienation in their gazes that intervenes) that perhaps hides a void, an anxiety or maybe just deep bourgeois boredom (in a discussion she says to him "I would like not to love you or love you much better").

After setting a meeting at the same time in the same place (we'll see each other tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after and tonight the two lovers part with an embrace that seems like a goodbye, hiding something strange in their eyes and, as the sun eclipses, the bus passes at the same time, neither will show up. The final scene, magnificent, ends with a shot of the place where the two meet and how it is transfigured by the eclipse becoming something eerie just as the modern man might become without a heart. This is not explicitly said by Antonioni, the director never wants to convey strong thoughts, too clear messages but rather seeks for the viewer to create the meaning, which is the true essence of modern cinema, just like open endings.

Unfortunately, this latter aspect is often mistaken for snobbery or boredom but I believe it is an easy and naive explanation, it is rather the cinema of an aesthete with a magnificent talent for images and atmospheres, things now forgotten.

Worth noting: Vitti is perfect as an actress, in my opinion the most elegant in Italian cinema and the pairing with Delon is well-matched in both love scenes and comedic ones.