L’Eclisse (1962)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

L’Eclisse (1962) – M. Antonioni

This time through, I watched Antonioni’s The Eclipse (third film in his famed trilogy) with Richard Pena’s commentary and it shed more light on this notoriously abstract film (he positions it somewhere between traditional narrative cinema and the more purely experimental films of the day – but much closer to narrative, it should be said). As the film opens, Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is splitting up with her boyfriend, Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) who wishes she wouldn’t. She leaves on foot past the EUR tower (another architectural landmark which Antonioni loves to film) in a gentrified area of Rome and heads to the local stock market where her mother is a small-time investor. Little do we know at this point that Piero (Alain Delon), her mother’s broker, will become her next love interest. Although Antonioni sticks with Vittoria long enough to see her visit a friend from Kenya (allowing the director to elicit viewers’ reactions to European colonialism), soon the film shifts gears to observe Piero who likes fast cars and call girls. It is hard to see how he will connect with Vittoria who seems disconnected from people but after some awkward scenes at his parents’ house, the film cuts forward in time, where they seem to be a happy couple.  We see them in certain locations in Rome and then they part, planning to meet the next day.  Instead, Antonioni shows us these same locations without Vittoria or Piero, as if they haven’t bothered to show up (for a full seven minutes). We are left to ponder the meaning of this jarring finale. Has their relationship ended? Are all relationships transient then? Or are we meant think about how the places around us will continue to exist after we’re gone, really gone? Are our actions really just devoid of meaning? Or perhaps the actions of the new bourgeoisie, cut off from the moral foundations of the past, lost or finding themselves only in materialism, are Antonioni’s target, as in the previous films of the trilogy. The digression about the drunken man who steals Piero’s sports car and dies in an accident may tell us as much. In any case, this is one to ponder.