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Modern Milan is both gilded cage and ghost town, reflections play over the credits as the camera glides down the side of a skyscraper. Amid the glass and concrete there's painful flesh, the author (Bernhard Wicki) expiring in his hospital room, a bit of comfort from friends and champagne and "una certa lucidità." The famous novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) heads into a party celebrating his latest book, his wife (Jeanne Moreau) sneaks out and keeps on walking. (Brawling lads, phallic rockets and ominous whooshes comprise her tour of the city.) "Millionaires collect intellectuals," one throws a soiree and invites the doleful pair, the full weight of coagulated emotion is felt over its course. Engulfing architecture, an "appalling style" that nevertheless beguiles Michelangelo Antonioni throughout his chronicle of marital-spiritual-creative impasse. The artist has become weak, "I no longer have inspirations, only recollections," the blowhard industrialist meanwhile considers companies his own works of art, he's the only one not miserable at the fête. The old don't believe a future exists so it lies in the hands of the young, namely the host's daughter (Monica Vitti), who's far more interested in inventing a new kind of shuffleboard. Stone squares in the garden give a Mondrian grid or two, the night turns the swimming pool black until a sudden downpour makes it come alive. (A quick, funny shot finds a cat staring at a statue's decapitated noggin, "expecting it to wake up.") Elongated torsos in luxurious sprawls, pensive and drenched, in and out of silhouette. Brush with a nymphomaniac and acrobatic stripping at the nightclub, "amusements." The glittering social whirl out of Minnelli is slowed down by Antonioni, it's got Broch's The Sleepwalkers and D'Annunzio's turtle and Umberto Eco himself. "Do you enjoy playing the cynic?" "No." A desperate parody of an embrace tries to revive love, though L'Eclisse knows better. Cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo. With Maria Pia Luzi, Rosy Mazzacurati, Guido A. Marsan, Vincenzo Corbella, and Giorgio Negro. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |