Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Starring Alain Delon and Monica Vitti.
Starring Alain Delon and Monica Vitti.
In a Nutshell: A woman leaves her lover and drifts into an affair with a stockbroker.
L’eclisse marks the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy following the dissolve of modern relationships. It follows similar themes of alienation and the cold affront of modern technology. His discomfort with the world’s direction is all the more heightened; Rome’s architecture is photographed like the cities of a science fiction movie. Equally disaffected is Vittoria, played by Antonioni regular Monica Vitti. After a fight with her writer beau (Francisco Rabal), she breaks off their affair but is unable express why. Before meeting the cocky stockbroker Piero (Alain Delon), Vittoria wanders the land, finding comfort outside of the city and within her imagination. Her eventual meeting with Piero reveals an indecisiveness that gradually fades, though far from true affection. Their love is surface, and this shallow attraction is one of the few emotions that technology has yet to erase.
L’eclisse marks the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy following the dissolve of modern relationships. It follows similar themes of alienation and the cold affront of modern technology. His discomfort with the world’s direction is all the more heightened; Rome’s architecture is photographed like the cities of a science fiction movie. Equally disaffected is Vittoria, played by Antonioni regular Monica Vitti. After a fight with her writer beau (Francisco Rabal), she breaks off their affair but is unable express why. Before meeting the cocky stockbroker Piero (Alain Delon), Vittoria wanders the land, finding comfort outside of the city and within her imagination. Her eventual meeting with Piero reveals an indecisiveness that gradually fades, though far from true affection. Their love is surface, and this shallow attraction is one of the few emotions that technology has yet to erase.
Dialogue is so sparse that L’eclisse could affect as a silent film. Love does not go unsaid; Vittoria and Piero have no honest feelings to articulate. Antonioni studies the banality of their relationship with careful detail. Their moments together are disjointed as if the narrative keeps choking on any momentum. Both characters share most of their scene separately and do not appear to inhibit the same world. Antonioni’s commentary on Piero’s life turns the stock exchange into a hermetically-sealed pit of chaos. Vittoria’s world is quieter, but one where she desires to escape (she uses blackface to try identifying with an African woman in a reference to the Second Italo–Abyssinian War). When the two meet, the small beats in their talk linger long enough to ring hollow.
Vittoria and Piero follow the path of every doomed Antonioni romance, with unrealized explanation. L’eclisse is more refined than the previous Incommunicability films in presenting the destroying power of environment, not just its people. We do not know explicitly what compelled Vittoria to distance herself from her lovers, and Antonioni wisely avoids blunt answers. He frequently holds our attention on the couple, daring us to weigh their relationship against their vacuous world. Shot with equal beauty and cold sterility, L’eclisse quietly comments on humanity’s loss granted by modern life. A poetic stroke of human instability.
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