L’Eclisse

L’Eclisse (1963)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Actors: Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, Francisco Rabal

Synopsis: Over a series of weeks in Rome, a young woman, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), ends one relationship, then slowly becomes involved in another – with a buccaneering stockbroker, Piero (Alain Delon).

Review: Monica Vitti’s Vittoria book-ends L’Eclisse in seemingly polar romantic states. At the beginning of the film, she’s in the throes of an all too recognisable state of malaise and break up. Almost following on exactly in tone from Michelangelo Antonioni’s marital discord piece La Notte from the previous year, the discomfiting and silent opening five minutes as Vittoria plucks up the courage to walk out on present beau, Riccardo, replete with the agonising sound of a rotating fan punctuating that silence, is a masterclass in embalming the film in an immediate state of ennui and stasis.

By the end of L’Eclisse, and a couple of months further on in the narrative, Vittoria appears to be on healthier ground with her new love-match, dashing stockbroker Piero. But that air of discord and unease permeates even more tangibly now than at the film’s beginning. Vittoria and Piero seemingly fail to make their next meeting, and, instead, Antonioni lingers on the jarring architecture and absent vistas of their previous date – perhaps a visual motif that Richard Linklater was to co-opt for his Before Sunrise/Sunset diptych? Incidentally, Vitti and Alain Delon (playing Piero) were captured at the peak of their young beauty here and must surely make for one of the most attractive and iconic of couples in screen history.

As with L’Avventura and La Notte, Antonioni’s attentiveness to the sensory and almost karmic aura of the modern world is to the fore. His depiction of the Italian stock exchange is especially powerful. It’s a cesspit of frenzied mania, only briefly slowing down for a wry scene where the brokers agree to a one-minute silence for a deceased colleague. Antonioni juxtaposes the chaos and depressing materiality of the stock exchange with a scene that literally transcends the city when Vittoria and friends take a plane ride from Rome to Verona, with Vittoria revelling in the escapism and wondrous canvas that the sky provides.

For much of the film however, Vittoria feels caged within her Roman world. She is often framed behind gates, fences and metallic structures, and there is a very clever scene where she shadows a forlorn ageing gent who has just lost 50 million lire in the latest market crash. Where some of Antonioni’s politicking in his films can be extremely subtle, here it is much more explicit. Vittoria, who has been witness to this man’s horrendous financial loss, almost stalks him out of a morbid fascination. She wants to see what a man who has lost everything in the space of a few moments does in the immediate aftermath of that catastrophe. She follows him to a café where he idly sketches some flowers on a scrap of paper while waiting for his drink, leaving this on a table for Vittoria to pick up. This little scrap becomes something of an emblem throughout the rest of the film, as Vittoria herself discards it soon after. It is a memento of something fragile and pastoral – a spirit patently absent amid the harsh angular concrete and mass hysteria of the modern metropolis. (May 2020)