L'Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (The Eclipse) is the last part of his informal trilogy of eros, estrangement and alienation, that he made in the early sixties, that golden era of European art cinema. L'Avventura (which I have seen and absolutely adore) and Le Notte (which I haven't seen yet) respectively form the first and the second installment. They are all different stories and are united only thematically and the central character (played with inscrutable, totally European sensuality (don't ask me what it is!), by Monica Vitti). All of these three films explore the difficulties of human relationhips in modern urban life. How people drift into each other, prodded as they are by the loneliness and existential ennui, and finally how they drift apart once they realize the difficulty of sustaining any deeper connection for even a short period of time.

In L'Avventura, after a girl mysteriously disappears from a yachting trip on a distant volcanic island, her friend and her lover start searching for her all over Sicily and then, in the process fall in love only to realise how illusory and transient that feeling of connectedness was. L'Eclisse is very similar in terms of narrative structure, only it is visually even more daring, with almost abstract looking long shots completely bereft of dialogues or even background music for most of the film.

The film begins with the breakup of the relationship between Vittoria, who is a translator by profession, with Riccardo who is perhaps somekind of a writer or publisher. As I said earlier there is hardly any dialogue or any extra-diegetic sound for most of the film. The break-up between the two is shown in a purely visual manner by accentuating the distance between them by using unusual camera angles and framing. After the break-up Vittoria starts drifting on the roads of Rome which she continues to do pretty much for the entire film. She meets up the young and energetic stockbroker played by Alain Delon and starts a tentative affair with him. In the entire film Monica Vitti wears the same expression of the same mysterious sadness, perhaps borne of some deep and radical detachment from everything around her. Even when she is playing erotic games with the hero, her mind seems to be somewhere else plagued by some inexlicable sadness. But what is she thinking? She never tells us and we never get to know. Finally this affair, which was always tentative from the beginning, also comes to an end, when they both acknowledge how shallow it is and fail to turn up where they had to agreed to meet earlier.

The final scene, which lasts more than five minutes, is nothing short of brilliant. It is completely soundless and the characters with whom we spent the first more than two hours are nowhere to be seen. Instead Antonioni like an avant-garde documentary filmamker surveys the urban landscape of the streets of Rome, showing a man getting off a bus holding a newspaper with headlines informing about the nuclear age, or other abstract images like water trickling down from a barrel onto the starched ground or birds perched on geometrically aligned rooftops. It is difficult to understand what Antonioni wants to say in this final reel. Does he hint at the disappearance of life itself by emphasising the utterly life-less urban landscape? I don't know. Whatever it is, the feeling that you have seen something out of ordinary, mysterious yet enlightening remains even long after the film is actually over. Very highly recommended.