L'Eclisse - Cinepinion

L'ECLISSE
Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Internet Movie Database Entry for full details

GRADE: A (3.7/4)

1962.

In the last five minutes of L’Eclisse (commonly translated as “Eclipse”, though if my Italian serves me correctly it’s plural), there’s a shot of a tree seen through a chain-link fence, the perfect expression of the film’s overflowing concern with modern alienation – not from nature, but from the natural. L’Eclisse really comes alive in its last five minutes, as Antonioni fills the screen with a series of mostly modern and strange-looking spaces our protagonists had previously inhabited but from which they are now conspicuously absent. Love, and life, is fleeting.

L’Eclisse feels like three loosely connected films: a woman’s two love affairs and a stock-market crash. Modern Italy is “complicated” Monica Vitti, as Vittoria, declares, using the art-house codeword for “alienating”; it’s contrasted at one point to a character’s recollections of the straightforwardness of life in Kenya, which the other characters can only experience through media -- records, photographs, and artifacts -- culminating in an embarrassing dress-up game of “playing negroes”.

In fact, modernity is so alienating that the characters are far more corybantic about the stock market crash and the loss of money than they are about a romantic break-up and the loss of love. Nowhere is the artificiality and vacuity of the modern world clearer than at the stock exchange, where a room full of ferociously fervent gamblers actively shouting at one another and bouncing around still manages to be the loneliest space in the film. In such a world where people are more afraid of penury than loneliness how could anyone experience the natural simplicity of love?

Though they try. Vittoria leaves her fiancé and is soon involved with her mother’s stockbroker, Piero (Alain Delon). He mystifies her somewhat when he declares the stock exchange to be his passion. Love of man has been supplanted by love of money, transformed into just another impermanent commodity. When Piero’s car is stolen by a drunk who crashes it and dies, he has no concern for the dead man, only for the car and the time wasted retrieving it. When the stock exchange has a moment of silence for a colleague who died of a heart attack, he breaks it by whispering mockeries to Vittoria. Yes, he knew the man, but after all moments wasted here equals billions wasted. If you could be put a price tag on sentimentality, it would be only be a handful of lire.

While looking out at the futuristic landscape, Piero professes, “I feel like I’m in a foreign country,” to which Vittoria retorts, “funny, that’s how I feel around you.” Ha! And the most passionate kiss they share on-screen has their lips separated by a pane of window glass – could L’Eclisse and its characters be any more estranged? -- Henry Stewart

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