L’Eclisse
Criterion, $39.95
Even “The Sickness of Eros” has unexpected side effects. Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy documenting Italy’s nouveau bourgeoisie, beginning with 1960’s intoxicating L’Avventura and continuing the following year with the equally enigmatic La Notte, comes to a blinding head with L’Eclisse (1962). In a second DVD of supplements, cinematic authority Adriano Aprà unites the first and last installments of Antonioni’s loose series as “white” films sandwiching La Notte‘s literal darkness, ascribing a science-fiction quality to L’Eclisse‘s modernist abstraction of the atomic age. Whereas postwar Italian neorealists wallowed in Rome’s inner-city crime and punishment, Antonioni ventures uptown to find a sort of apocalyptic abandonment, Mediterranean light diffusing an otherworldly glow. Likewise, Antonioni’s live-in muse, Monica Vitti, abandons one lover (Francisco Rabal) for another (Alain Delon), but as sick with longing as she is, her glow grows with each passing frame of this animated series of still-lifes. The almost jarring levity of Vitti’s African dance, not to mention the cloud-hopping airplane scene, contrasts the film’s remarkable sequences inside the Roman stock exchange. Casually driven by idle concerns, L’Eclisse radiates Vitti and Delon in its languid pacing, their affair rapturous in the last third of the narrative. Eros, as far as maladies go, is the only way to fly.This article appears in May 27 • 2005.
