L'eclisse

Plot synopsis:
On a Monday of July 1961, at dawn, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a young literary translator, breaks off her relationship with Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in his apartment in the EUR residential district of Rome, following a long night of conversation. Riccardo tries to persuade her to stay, but she tells him she no longer loves him and leaves. As she walks the deserted early-morning streets past the EUR water tower, Riccardo catches up and walks with her through a wooded area to her apartment building, where they say their final goodbyes.
Sometime later, Vittoria visits her mother (Lilla Brignone) at the frantic Rome Stock Exchange, which is very busy upon Vittoria's entrance. A young stockbroker, Piero (Alain Delon), overhears an inside tip, rushes to purchase the stocks, and then sells them at a large profit. He introduces himself to Vittoria; he is her mother's stock broker. Following the announcement of a colleague's fatal heart attack, the room erupts back into frenzied activity. Outside the building, Vittoria and her mother walk to an open market nearby. Vittoria attempts to discuss her own recent breakup, but her mother is preoccupied with her earned profits.
That evening, Vittoria's neighbor Anita (Rosanna Rory) comes to visit and they discuss the former's breakup. Vittoria says she is depressed, disgusted, and confused. Another neighbor, Marta (Mirella Ricciardi), calls and invites them to her apartment nearby. Marta talks about the farm she and her husband have in Kenya. For a game, Vittoria dresses up as an African dancer with dark makeup, and dances around the apartment. Marta, unamused, asks her to stop. The conversation turns sour as Marta, a colonialist, worries about "monkeys" arming themselves and threatening the minority whites. Vittoria and Anita dismiss such talk. When Marta's dog Zeus gets free of the house, the women take off after him. Vittoria is fascinated by the sound of the fencing in the wind. Back in her apartment, Riccardo calls for her, but she hides and doesn't answer.
The next day, Vittoria and Anita fly to Verona in a small airplane. On the way, Vittoria is fascinated by the clouds. At the airport, she watches the airplanes taking off and landing with childlike wonder. "It's so nice here," she tells Anita. Meanwhile, back at the Rome Stock Exchange, Piero is busy making trades. Vittoria arrives at the Stock Exchange and learns that her mother lost about ten million lire. Another man lost fifty million. Vittoria follows the man through the crowded streets to a small cafe, where she sees him drawing flowers on a small piece of paper and drinking mineral water before moving on. She meets up with Piero and he drives her to her mother's apartment in his Alfa Romeo Giulietta sportscar. She shows him framed family pictures and her room growing up. Piero tries to kiss her but she avoids his pass. Piero drives back to his office on Via Po near Via Salaria, where he must break the bad news to his investors.
After work outside his office, Piero meets with a call girl he previously arranged to meet, but is disappointed that she recently changed her hair color from blonde to brunette. Deciding not to go with her, Piero drives to Vittoria's apartment and stands outside her window. He hears her typing. After a drunk walks by and notices Vittoria at the window, Piero comes over. While they are talking, the drunk steals Piero's sportscar. The next morning, Piero and Vittoria arrive at the crash site where the drunk drove the car into a lake. Vittoria watches as they pull the car with the body from the water. As they walk away, Vittoria is surprised that Piero is concerned about the dents and the motor, rather than the dead man. They enjoy a playful walk through a park. When they reach her building, Vittoria unties a balloon from a carriage and calling to her new friend Marta tells her to shoot the balloon, which she does as it ascends into the sky. When they reach her building, he kisses her, but she seems uneasy. Before she leaves, she drops a piece of wood into a barrel of water.
That evening, Vittoria tries to call Piero, but his phone is busy. When she finally reaches him, she does not speak. The next day, while waiting outside near her house, Vittoria looks in the barrel of water and sees the wood is still there. Piero arrives and tells her he bought a new BMW to replace his Alfa Romeo. She asks to go to his place. They walk past a nurse wheeling a young girl in a baby carriage. Piero takes her to his parents' apartment, which is filled with beautiful works of art and sculpture. As they talk, she seems nervous and unwilling to open up to him: "Two people shouldn't know each other too well if they want to fall in love. But then maybe they shouldn't fall in love at all." They converse playfully, kiss each other through a glass window, and then kiss passionately. After he accidentally tears her dress, she goes into a bedroom and looks at the old family pictures. At the window she looks down to the street where she sees two nuns walking, some people talking at a cafe, a lone soldier standing on a corner waiting. Piero comes to the bedroom and they make love.
Sometime later, Piero and Vittoria are lying on a hill looking up at the sky. He looks around and says, "I feel like I'm in a foreign country." She says that's how she feels around him. He gets upset when he doesn't understand what she's feeling. She says, "I wish I didn't love you or that I loved you much more." Sometime later at his office, Vittoria and Piero kiss and embrace playfully on the couch, even wrestling on the floor like children. When an alarm goes off, they prepare to part. They embrace and talk of seeing each other every day. They agree to meet that evening at 8:00 pm at the "usual place" near her apartment. That evening, on Sunday 10 September 1961, neither shows up at the appointed meeting place.

Tags: romantic

Review:
How intently he gets inside Vittoria's head, and at the same time maintains a detachment despite the varying emotional contexts, is extraordinary, if highly personal.Like Vittoria, Antonioni does something that's fascinating throughout the film - though one doesn't know what it is exactly that holds Vittoria, and for that matter Piero, in their respective attitudes, one doesn't feel quite left out of anything heart-stopping for the story/character's sake.
This is the kind of motion picture that a shot-by-shot analysis would serve like would a Picasso or Chagal.And as a plus to the film's success are the actors turns - Monica Vitti is the only actress from that period and country I can think of who could've pulled off what Antonioni wanted in Vittoria.
That under current to the story - the major bustle and noise of the gamblers in the stockbroker's hall - is also part of the contrast, to the stretches with minimal dialog and sound.The last act, which regards Vittoria's relationship to Piero (a time after he empty break-up with her past lover Rodrigo) culminates in an astonishing feat of storytelling and film-art.
L'Eclisse (1962) is a profoundly artistic, wonderfully crafted modern Italian film, in which the audience is permitted to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing on the screen.Unlike most directors, who construct their films in very specific, traditional ways to tell stories they wish to convey, in L'Eclisse the director Michelangelo Antonioni paints pictures which mean different things to different people.
The commentator completely misses this message.Acting is superb by all three leads, Monica Vitti, with her finely chiseled face and wild blonde hair, Alain Delon, who conveys emotions easily with just the flick of an eyebrow, and Francisco Rabal, classically handsome and intense.
Also of note is the actress who plays Vittoria's mother, Lila Brignone, who does a good job depicting the emotional distance the character feels from the estranged daughter, which in turn conveys to the audience one of the primary reasons Vittoria is afraid of intimacy: she never had a demonstrative relationship with her mother.If you're a fan of Italian cinema, don't miss L'Eclisse.
L'Eclisse (1962)***1/2 Third film in Antonioni's trilogy of alienation following L'Avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961) about a young woman (Monica Vitti) and her brief affair with handsome Alain Delon.Like in his other movies, Antonioni uses specific techniques not to tell the story but rather to express the lack of communication among the characters, their alienation and incapableness to make a strong and meaningful relation.
Anyway, long cadres, real time events, visual metaphors and visual contrasts between the characters on the one side and landscapes and/or modern day creations like buildings, streets (usually empty) on the other is what makes this rather experience than a plot-movie (intentionally) but nevertheless effective in their purpose (which is to express and transmit this same feelings of alienation to the viewer).
The Eclipse denotes Michelangelo Antonioni 's flawless taste,and his powerful,virile instinct for strong compositions;this elegant and suave movie is one of the cinema's best pieces of poetry (I must also confess that I prefer this early,younger,"black and white" and peninsular Michelangelo Antonioni;he was 50 years when he made L'ECLISSE).Before he approached the '60s counterculture,Antonioni made a few strong movies not only for the intellectuals but also about intellectuals.This one is an incredibly rich movie,a movie about many things:about solitude,financial pawns,a woman's indefinite aspirations,the vibrating city beauty,and the heart's resilience,the woman soul's density,the urban aesthetic;and also about:greed,people that search gropingly .Little wheels in the gearing of the stock exchange;the stock exchange's crushing machine.Antonioni is caustic and sober.His theme,the human monad,is inexhaustible.The naturalness,the charm,the intensity,the integrity,the width of this film must be mentioned.Antonioni proved that,for his cinema,experiments are always ways and means,while the most intense poetry is the aim.(Each great director is an experimenter;all great directors are experimenters,only to be better poets.)Antonioni is one of the three directors who,according to Averty,never made a bad movie (and Antonioni's creation was,for almost two decades, quite abundant;it is only after Blowup (1966) that he went slow,making some seven movies in so many decades).His movies don't have a "sockdolager",that's part of what makes them so good and endearing.Experimenting in countless ways,Antonioni never forgot to be a poet,and never failed.His aesthetic aim has a side of ingenuity and directness that enchants in an unfailing way.And what is Antonioni's poetry?It is this compact texture,this density of the people and of the life,the striking immediacy.It is amazing also how Antonioni put all of himself in this beautiful movie,The Eclipse.Like a few others,The Eclipse is one of the movies that give us the taste of what cinema can be..
Is the answer to somehow find a way to ride the air, rather than be blown hither and thither?In the few Antonioni films I have seen, I do love how the "plot" can drift as much as the characters.
It is so desperately tender; Alain Delon and Monica Vitti are so young and beautiful, and at the same time - so precise in their naiveté; the camera shots are so long and ambiguous, so empty of words.
This film was made in 1962, a year after the Berlin crisis, and in the year of the Cuba crisis when we came very close to nuclear war between the USA and the USSR.The film also depicts the greed of capitalism, as shown in the mad, chaotic scenes in the Rome Stock Exchange and the obsessive gambling of the mother character.The location, with distant shots of Benito Mussolini's EUR buildings on the outskirts of Rome, also suggest a meaningless, empty, soulless Brave New World all overshadowed by the nuclear threat, where people suffer loneliness and depression and feel unable to make long-term commitments..
The materialist Piero and the absent Vittoria begins a monosyllabic relationship."L'Eclisse" is a love story in the world of Michelangelo Antoniani, where the lack of communication, emptiness and loneliness in the big city prevails over the human feelings.
Monica Vitti, the favorite actress of Antonioni, shows a stunning beauty and her alienation of feelings is expressed by her face and few words along the story.
I can't imagine any film student not being advised to watch the last 10 minutes of L'Eclisse by a wise course teacher.Alain Delon could not have been better cast as a shallow and materialistic, young proto-yuppie prat.
Though she was only on screen for a brief while, I admired the performance of Lilla Brignone as Vittoria's Stock Exchange-obsessed mother, completely oblivious to her daughter's emotional states throughout.Monica Vitti, with a wardrobe as varied and flattering as Maggie Cheung's in In the Mood for Love, looks beautiful but is possibly the weakest, or most predictable of the movie's performers.
A young woman (Monica Vitti) meets a vital young man (Alain Delon), but their love affair is doomed because of the man's materialistic nature.Director Martin Scorsese described how the film haunted and inspired him as a young moviegoer, noting it seemed to him a "step forward in storytelling" and "felt less like a story and more like a poem." He adds that the ending is "a frightening way to end a film...
Like much of his work, L' Eclisse (1962) finds director Michelangelo Antonioni creating a slow, fragmented investigation about sight and perception, about people at odds with one another and the world that they inhabit, and left hopeless and weak as their internal thoughts and fears are projected outward, against the world, creating a void that sucks the life from everything, leaving only silence.
This is an idea that can be seen in much of the director's best work, from the other two films that form the basis of this informal trilogy, to his iconic and unconventional examination into the conventions of the thriller with Blowup (1966).L' Eclisse begins with a scene that recalls elements of Antonioni's first film in the trilogy, L'avventura (1960), with a couple going through the motions of a break-up from late evening to early dawn.
The rest of the film is therefore the echo of this event, the emotional fallout in which our central character attempts to reconcile her particular ideas about love and commitment that are at odds with social and economical climate of Italy of this era, eventually leading to the ultimate breakdown of communication at even its most basic of levels.Alongside these central issues, Antonioni riffs on the ideas of confrontation and crisis, framing his story of a relationship break-up against a backdrop of a terrible-stock market crash, and suggesting at the end of the film via a headline on a newspaper of the impending "atomic age"; suggesting further ideas of confrontation and crisis that could eventually follow.
Watching it, I was certainly interested in the characters and concerned about the direction that the story was taking, while on a more superficial level, I loved the scenes set within the stock-market or the vague and elliptical sequence in which the central character follows a man who has just lost his entire life savings on the financial crash and observes him passively draw flowers on a napkin in an almost complete acceptance of his tragic fate; but even in spite of this, the final moments of the film and the sense of emotional connection created after the last credit had rolled, turned this film into an absolute masterpiece; one of those films that I could watch again and again and again and still find the same sense of emotional transcendence that I did the very first time.As ever with Antonioni there will be some viewers who find the film slow and perhaps even boring (though really, there's no such thing as a boring film, just boring viewers) but for me, L' Eclisse was entirely fascinating.
Combined with Antonioni's masterful use of shot composition, editing and production design, which turn elements of suburban Italy into an infernal labyrinth of looming apartment blocks and vast empty spaces of cloudless sky and we have a film that manages, as one viewer puts it, to change our perspective on the world.
His unconventional narrative reveals a naked truth, especially in final scenes.The characters are lost and vague.Monica Vitti as Vittoria is a timid and suspicious young woman, who sees the pieces of greed and lust in the people around her.
The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni's trilogy about alienation in the modern world is about a woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves her lover (Francisco Rabal) for a materialistic stockbroker (Alain Delon).
It all blends together into one big picture, while the director seems to be saying: this is how we live, this is where we are going.The movie is full of details, like the necklace made of a solid iron chain that the Vitti character is wearing in her last scene.The final sequence, which is also the climax of the film, can mean anything and nothing.
Monica Vitti and Alain Delon make the two leads more human and real than earlier Antonioni main characters.
With simpler characters and a more predictable story than the counterparts in the two preceding films, L'Eclisse is an unbelievably lazy work to conclude Antonioni's otherwise great 60s trilogy.
Some of Antonioni's best and most accomplished directing can be seen here too, like with 'L'avventura' and 'La Notte' he approaches the subject in a thought-provoking and brutally truthful yet sincere manner that doesn't try too hard.Monica Vitti's performance is one of her best, very alluring in looks and emotionally powerful.
I think it becomes clear in the film that the relationship between Monica Vitti and Alain Delon will also fail, so distant are the ways of being each other, she (apparently) being happy with trivial and simple things and not giving value to money, he extremely "scrambled" and materialistic.
If sexy stars like Monica Vitti and Alain Delon can't lose themselves in a syrupy love story that tricks us into thinking that the world isn't a cruel place, then who can?
I'm not sure if I saw the purpose of these long stock exchange segments - something about materialism and maybe the emptiness of it (e.g. that thing about the money people lost in the crash essentially just disappearing) I suppose.There was this great line by Vitti, something like "I wish I didn't love you or that I loved you more" which was Antonioni at his finest..
I suppose that's the point but it seems like Antonioni stretches things a little too far with the modern alienation in both the beginning and ending of this film.
I can only wonder how a country like Italy, which experienced such enormous loss of life and property in World War II, 17 years later was willing to finance a large number of complex and intelligent films like L'ECLISSE, which could not possibly do well at the box office.It is sad to see that the reflective, thoughtful movie is basically extinct these days, even in Italy, that land of culture, knowledge and beauty.
It is, above all, a sad comment on the human mind which, at the zenith of its technological knowledge, is sadly losing touch with cinema that addresses inner issues such as L'ECLISSE does, namely the vagaries of love hand in hand with the thirst for materialism and sex, and the inexorable passing of time.Alain Delon is excellent in his portrayal of a stock exchange broker who, as Victoria (Vitti) points out, does not stop still but is constantly doing something to make money or to satisfy his lust.
Love is as beyond reach for Vittoria as distant Kenya and the snows on the Kilimanjaro.Photography is superlative (especially the chiaroscuro of the more intimate moments between the leads); screenplay is solid enough to prevent the film sliding into pretentiousness, and to keep you interested, right up to the completely original and unique ending, reflecting the essence of life in all its indifference, inevitability - and passing of time.Early in the movie, there is a sequence at Verona aerodrome, Verona being the town of Romeo and Juliet.
Antonioni's direction shows him at the top of his considerable skills - only BLOW-UP would be (marginally) better.Naturally, in this age of constant change and fast tracking, few would waste time on a thought-provoking film - which is a pity, as it is bound to further erode the audience's level of exigency, and the quality of current movie-making.Grazie mille, Michelangelo!.
While notable for it's naturalistic urban milieu depictions, the stellar production design by production designer and art director Piero Poletto, black-and-white cinematography by Italian cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo (1920-1966) and the fine editing by Italian film editor Eraldo Da Roma, this character-driven and dialog-driven drama which examines themes like interpersonal relations, interpersonal communication, alienation and love contains an efficient score by Italian 20th century composer Giovanni Fusco (1906-1968).This rhythmic, somewhat romantic and at times significantly atmospheric story where the distance between the characters and the violence within the frames and the use of light creates a poignant underlying tension, depicts a condensed study of character and is impelled and reinforced by it's fragmented narrative structure and the compelling acting performances by French-Swiss actor Alain Delon and Italian actress Monica Vitti.
Monica Vitti like in other Antonioni's film's, on her class and beauty.
We get the first inklings of the emptiness of desire, Antonioni would perfect this in his following film.The importance of all this is perhaps that in 1962 it was desirable to see a love story done this way.
Maybe, every film shapes how we watch other movies.Antonioni makes me more aware of the architecture of scene—that is just one aspect of his work.
From director Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, Blowup), this film listed in the book of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die sounded interesting enough, I obviously had no idea about the concept or what it would be about, in a way that was a good thing, I like to surprised.
Basically the tale sees Vittoria (Monica Vitti) having an imperfect relationship with staunch intellectual Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) and suffering a breakup, and soon after attracting romantic feelings from stockbroker Piero (Alain Delon).
This movie gives off a degree of science fiction, with such utter significance to framing and blocking off things towards the idea of obscurity that it doesn't seem to exist in our world, a world where we move aside to get out of the way, or focus on infinite planes of existence rather than many.Not all the film is like this, of course, because we do have a story, and the story is about the ultimately doomed relationship of a stock market broker and a young woman who only fits in with the world of perpendicular obscured objects.
Well, 43 years of film school will do that to a medium: every major director has doubtless studied *L'Eclisse* in class, and even if today's Big-Shot Director doesn't make movies like this anymore, Antonioni's influence weighs heavily on even the most commercial work of today.
Trying to describe what the film - or any other work by Antonioni - is about, is not a simple task as it can't be reduced to a plot synopsis, although it is definitely preoccupied with the narrative space between events, actions and intentional dialogue.The opening scene is a long sequence set in an apartment showing two lovers, Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), at the end of a love affair.
Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (The Eclipse), his 1962 black and white capstone of his Alienation Trilogy that began with L'Avventura and continued with La Notte, is arguably a great film, but still a cut or two below its immediate predecessor, the indisputably brilliant La Notte, simply because it lacks the story and excellent portrayal of a human relationship that that earlier film has.
Being the last film that Antonioni shot in black and white, it closes a chapter and with colour in The Red Desert, opens a new one.L'Eclisse opens with a man and woman in total silence in an apartment.