Monica Vitti

(On Cable TV, October 2019) That’s it—I’m done with Michelangelo Antonioni. I’ve seen four of his films and mildly liked only one of them, and that one is due to Blow-up having inspired both Blow-Out and Austin Powers. For his core alienation trilogy, L’eclisse merely reiterate (at great length) everything I felt about L’avventura or La notte—dull drama about unlikable characters and a director who’s clearly not interested in conventional narrative moviemaking. L’eclisse is overlong, uninterested in telling a story, in love with its own way of avoiding conventionality even at the expense of basic watchability. But I repeat myself. I could go on, but the point isn’t as much that I disliked the movie, but that it’s not a movie made for me. Coming from the early 1960s, it’s an experiment rebelling against the formalism of Italian cinema, a first foray in portraying a rejuvenated Rome after the lean post-war years, a series of experiments with cinematic form, and a refusal to play it safe. Considering nearly 60 years of subsequent experimentation in pushing the barriers of cinema, it’s a fair bet to say that other directors have pushed the envelope farther, and that if other directors haven’t, it’s because you lose a considerable portion of the audience along the way. If pressed, I do have a few nice things to say about L’eclisse: Alain Delon is cool despite showing up late in the film. The sequences at the Italian stock market are fascinating and Monica Vitti is always wonderful to watch. There’s clearly an artistic intent at work. But when you throw these elements together, I just can’t stand the result—too long, too dull, and so self-indulgent that I’m not even willing to play along. And that stands for Antonioni as a whole. It’s not because some 1960s critics were rapturous about the result that I must feel the same way.