Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Italy

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 6

    TIFF 2012 – Day 6

    Dormant Beauty

    Dir. by Marco Bellocchio
    Inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who spent seventeen years in a vegetative state and ignited a national cause célèbre, Dormant Beauty tackles the subject of euthanasia by weaving together four stories. In the first, a Senator (Tony Servillo) with first-hand experience of the issue prepares to cast a vote that pits his conscience against his party. Meanwhile, his daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), while participating in pro-life demonstrations, falls for a man whose emotionally-troubled brother is arrested while protesting for the right to die. In the third story, a beautiful drug addict (Maya Sansa) with suicidal tendencies is nursed back to life — perhaps in more ways than one — by a handsome doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). And, finally, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert) abandons her career, becomes a recluse, and dedicates her life to caring for her comatose daughter and praying to God for a miracle.

    As that summary should suggest, Dormant Beauty is in many respects standard, made-for-TV fare. The script hits every predictable beat. When two characters argue, each actor waits patiently for the other to finish his or her line before responding. Huppert’s devout Catholic whispers on-the-nose lines like, “I can’t hope Rosa wakes up unless I have innocence — unless I have faith.” And yet Bellocchio makes it so much damn fun to watch, especially the story line involving the Senator, which he turns into a Juvenalian satire of politics in a media age. Nearly every shot catches a glimpse of a TV screen in the background that is tuned to coverage of the vote, including several scenes set in the bizarre underworld of the legislative baths, where naked Senators consult with a mephistophelean character known only as Lo psichiatra (The Psychiatrist), who offers political advice and anti-depressants by the handful. I especially like one shot near the end, when Senators come rushing through a door after a vote and by some trick of the camera (a really long lens that flattens depth?), the Senate chamber appears to have been replaced completely by a pixelated video monitor. Dormant Beauty is a bit of a disappointment after Bellocchio’s previous film, the excellent Vincere (2009) — it loses momentum each time Belocchio cuts away from the Senator and his daughter — but its best moments were some of the most exciting of the festival.

    Something in the Air

    Dir. by Olivier Assayas
    Set three years after May ’68 and loosely inspired by Assayas’s own political and artistic coming-of-age, Something in the Air follows seventeen-year-old Gilles (Clement Metayer) from his first direct action in the student movement to a sojourn through Italy to his eventual return to Paris, where he studies art and apprentices under his father in the commercial movie business while attending programs of experimental films at night. Something in the Air offers an interesting point of comparison with Dormant Beauty. In both cases, the writer-directors produced fairly banal scripts, but whereas Belocchio frequently generates new and exciting images from the material, Assayas’s direction is strangely anonymous and unremarkable. For a film about beautiful young people discovering sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and revolution, Something in the Air is inert and humorless. Boring, even.

    I did enjoy, however, some of the ironies built into Assayas’s backward glance. Something in the Air tackles a relatively un-sexy moment in the history of the Left and its heroes are refreshingly unheroic. More radicalism tourist than party soldier, Gilles is chastised in one scene by older revolutionaries for believing the reports of bodies washing up in Maoist China. And poor Christine (Lola Créton) abandons Gilles for a group of revolutionary filmmakers only to end up answering telephones and washing their dishes. Assayas’s version of the post-’68 Left is more than a bit sexist, and the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism is felt in the film — intentionally and ironically, I think — by its absence.

    Berberian Sound Studio

    Dir. by Peter Strickland
    Apparently I should have written about Berbarian Sound Studio while I was still in Toronto, because two weeks later I can barely remember it. My notes aren’t very helpful, either. The film opens with extreme closeups of analog sound equipment. Instead of opening titles for Berbarian Sound Studio, we see a fun, throw-back, animated credit sequence for The Equestrian Vortex, the low-budget horror film whose soundtrack Gilderoy (Toby Jones) has traveled to Italy to mix. And there is a dream sequence that was apparently impressive in some way. Thus ends my notes. (I average three pages per film at TIFF.)

    In a way, Berbarian Sound Studio is similar to Tower. Both are simple character studies that conform strictly to a set of internal rules. Here, Strickland limits his entire film to two locations, the studio and Gilderoy’s rented apartment, and likewise limits the camera’s perspective to Gilderoy’s increasingly unhinged point of view. The premise is enjoyable enough for forty minutes or so — I’m a sucker for films about filmmaking — but I was genuinely surprised when the closing titles started to run. I was still waiting for the plot to develop into . . . something. I suspect fans of Berbarian Sound Studio will enjoy debating which parts of the film actually happen and which parts exist only in Gilderoy’s mind. These types of questions are, I think, among the least interesting to ask of a film, and in this case I honestly don’t care.

    Nights with Theodore

    Dir. by Sébastien Betbeder
    Nights with Theodore is one of several oddly shaped films I saw at TIFF. The folding of the Visions program into Wavelengths allowed for more double features that paired, say, a 55-minute “feature” with a 30-minute “short.” Their schedule-unfriendly running times make films like this difficult to program, so I was encouraged to see more of them in the lineup this year. Most of my favorite films at the fest fall somewhere in this category. One pleasure of a 67-minute film like Theodore is that it necessarily breaks convention in the most fundamental way. As seasoned film watchers, we’re familiar, deep in our muscle memory, with 85- to 120-minute run times and predictable act breaks. (Peter Watkins, of course, has a thing or two to say about this.) I feel time differently, more consciously, when I watch a film like this because the shape of the narrative is rare and peculiar.

    In the case of Theodore, this unmoored-from-convention quality is essential to its success. A fragile nocturne of a film, it imagines the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as a fairy-tale wonderland pulsing with occult power. Betbeder cuts throughout the film between the main storyline — Theodore (Pio Marmaï) and Anna (Agathe Bonitzer) are young lovers who leap the fence of the Buttes-Chaumont night after night, irresistibly — and documentary material about the park itself. The film opens with archival maps, photographs, and film clips and with a brief history of the park’s founding. We see video footage of the park during the day time when it’s teeming with joggers, tourists, and picnickers. And Betbeder also include a brief interview with an environmental psychiatrist who recounts the story (truth or fiction?) of a man whose bouts with depression corresponded directly with his proximity to the park. I’d like to see Theodore again before declaring whether all of the pieces fit together to offer anything more than an impressionistic portrait of a place transformed by history, imagination, and obsessive love. Regardless, I’m eager to see what Betbeder does next.

    The Last Time I Saw Macao

    Dir. by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
    Equal parts city symphony, essay, film noir, and home movie, The Last Time I Saw Macao is fascinating conceptually but a bit of a mess. Compiled from hours and hours of video shot over many months and on multiple trips to Macao, the film began as a documentary; it was only during editing that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata stumbled upon the ultimate form of the project. Inspired by Joseph von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) and other Western, exoticized representations of the Orient, the co-directors scripted a B-movie intrigue involving an on-the-run beauty named Candy, a violent crime syndicate, and a much-sought-after, Kiss Me Deadly-like bird cage and then superimposed the drama onto the documentary footage by means of a voiceover and fiction-creating soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea. Suddenly a random stranger pacing the street and talking on his cell phone becomes a side player waiting for a clandestine meeting. With the addition of gunshot sounds, a couple shutting down their storefront for the night become the latest victims in a gang war.

    Guerra da Mata described The Last Time I Saw Macao as a “fiction contaminated by memory,” and, indeed, “fiction” and “memory” are almost interchangeable here. Guerra da Mata spent much of his childhood in Macao. We hear his voice. The unseen hero of the film has his name. We see him as a child in old family photos. And I wonder if that might account for the uneven tone and pacing of the film. It’s not by coincidence that Candy lives on Saudade Road. (Saudade might be imperfectly translated as a kind of a deep and pleasantly painful longing for something lost and never to return.)

    The ideas at play in this film are almost too numerous to count: the political and economic consequences of China’s takeover of Macao in 1999, the complex legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the queering of glamor and a critique of Western notions of Asian sexuality (I haven’t even mentioned the opening sequence, which turns the classic femme fatale song and dance number, like Jane Russell’s from the original Macao, into a beautiful, campy drag show). But The Last Time I Saw Macao fails, finally, to shape them into anything satisfyingly coherent. It was telling, I think, that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata invited their editor on stage for the Q&A. The noir idea could sustain an hour. The documentary images of Macao could as well. But Guerra de Mata’s saudade — what should be at the heart of the film — is described but too seldom felt.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 8

    2007 TIFF Day 8

    I’ve liked, to varying degrees, each of the films in Gus Van Sant’s “post-Bela Tarr epiphany” trilogy. Following his brief stint in Hollywood in the mid- to late-’90s, Van Sant has taken a refreshingly reckless approach toward film form. Under the spell of the mad Hungarian but also those guys from Taiwan and Tehran (Hou and Kiarostami, in particular), his films are unlike anything else coming out of the States. And God bless him for it. When I watch these movies, I feel like a lucky volunteer in one of Van Sant’s mad experiments. “Yeah, Gus,” I think to myself, “let’s see what happens when, during a five-minute tracking shot, we shift suddenly into slow motion. Let’s meld unironically beautiful music with images of teenage life just to see what kind of frisson we can generate. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walking silently through a desert for minutes at a time? I’m with you. Let’s go.”

    Any ambivalence I’ve felt toward Van Sant has usually been a by-product of his subject matter. Paranoid Park picks up exactly where the trilogy left off: at a moment of sudden violence. This time it’s an accidental death resulting from a run-of-the-mill act of adolescent rebellion. As was the case with Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, I’m not sure why Van Sant is so fixated on violence, and I’m not totally convinced that he has anything particularly meaningful to teach us about it. When she introduced Une vieille maitresse, Catherine Breillat told us she was interested in “the kind of Romance that isn’t pink and flowery but deep red and black and always close to death” (I’m paraphrasing), and I see Van Sant operating in a similar realm. He’s become our Ann Radcliffe, trading out her castle in the Pyrenees for a skate park in Portland but with the same goal in mind: the Sublime. Paranoid Park is my new favorite of Van Sant’s films, but I remain ambivalent about his subject matter. One last thing: seeing Christopher Doyle’s 4:3 compositions projected on a three-story screen at the ScotiaBank Theatre was a real treat and confirmed my thoughts about Reygadas.

    Help Me Eros gave me everything I’d expected of it: an amusing and sympathetic, low-key performance from writer/director Lee Kang-sheng; long, mostly-silent, static takes; inspired design; out-of-left-field musical numbers; and some good old-fashioned transgression. Lee plays a Bible-quoting day trader who went bust during Taiwan’s economic downturn and now spends his time smoking home-grown marijuana, talking to a counselor at a suicide helpline, and flirting with the girls at the betel nut stall below his apartment. Lee told us after the screening that much of the film is autobiographical — that in order to keep himself occupied between films, he’d made and lost a great deal of wealth in the market, and that the one time he called a helpline he got a busy signal. “I wondered how many other people in Taiwan were suffering,” he said. With Tsai Ming-liang acting as producer and production designer, it’s impossible to not speculate about his influence on the development of the film. But I suspect their partnership is a generous one, and Help Me Eros makes me think that Lee should, perhaps, be considered more seriously as a co-auteur of Tsai’s recent films. Help Me Eros fits comfortably alongside their other treatments of contemporary alienation and is distinguished, mostly, by its final image, which is more symbol-heavy and explicitly religious than anything we’ve seen from Tsai. The film drags a bit in the final act, but, all in all, it’s a solid and interesting effort.

    A quick story: While waiting in line for Naissance des pieuvres, I met a 70-year-old woman from Toronto who was seeing 50 films at the festival. She used to see even more, apparently, but her children made her swear off Midnight Madness. When I asked her what film she’d really liked, she said, “Oh, I loved Mongol. Talk about violence. That guy makes Tarrantino look like a pussy!” I was sipping from a bottle of water at the time and nearly died. Anyway, she and I had a conversation I’ve had many times over the years. When I mentioned how much I’d liked Secret Sunshine and Flight of the Red Balloon, she told me, “I traded those tickets away. I heard they were depressing.” I think what she actually meant was that they were “slow, boring, and/or sad.” They’re not, but that’s beside the point.

    I blame Bergman. When he came to prominence in the States in the late-1950s his films contributed greatly to the creation of a certain stereotype in the popular imagination: the Important Art Film — a dour, high-minded, angst-ridden thing that must be consumed like bitter medicine. (I hate to think of all the people over the years who have rented The Seventh Seal because of its reputation and never made a second trip back to the Foreign Film aisle.) The influence of that stereotype can still be felt at today’s festivals, both in the lines, where even devoted film buffs dismiss movies that might fit the mold, and in the films themselves.

    This is all a long and unfair preamble to Nanouk Leopold’s finely-acted family drama, Wolfsbergen. It’s about an aged man who has decided that he is tired of life and eager to be reunited with his long-dead wife. He informs his family that he will soon die, and the film follows the ripples of his decision through the lives of his children and grandchildren. They are a dysfunctional lot, to say the least, but had Leopold given each character the same time and careful attention, all could have been interesting enough to carry a film on their own, I think. Instead, some are barely fleshed out at all, and I found myself becoming increasingly curious about the people who were too often left off screen. Wolfsbergen wears the old stereotype well, and even I was a tad depressed by it. The final scene is a good one, though — good enough that I was forced to reevaluate my response to the film as a whole. And one last note about film aspect ratios: I have no idea why this film was shot in Cinemascope. Leopold often divides her wide frame in half and pushes characters to one side. This, I guess, mimics their alienation from one another, but too often she seems unsure about how to fill the image, and so we end up looking at out-of-focus walls and doorways. I wonder if the aspect ratio was chosen to accommodate the last shot, which does put ‘Scope to great use?

    The less I say about L’Amour Cache, the better. I programmed it because Isabelle Hupert is one of the few actors I treat as an auteur, but she is wasted here. This film is a disaster. In fact, it might be the first film I’ve ever seen that gets demonstrably worse with each and every cut. Poorly written, poorly directed, and incompetently edited. I never thought I’d see a boom mike in a TIFF film from a First World country.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 4

    2007 TIFF Day 4

    Lucia Puenzo’s XXY, in case you haven’t heard, is a coming-of-age story about a hermaphrodite. Alex has lived the first fifteen years of her life as a girl, but the inevitable onset of sexual desire — bewildering enough to those of us not suffering from gender confusion — has done a number on her and also on her parents, who have gone out of their way to protect Alex from discrimination and from the well-intentioned curiosity of doctors. Rather than castrate Alex as an infant, they decided to allow her to choose her gender when she was ready. XXY examines the consequences of that decision. What I most liked about the film was its treatment of that post-pubescent madness we all suffered through. Another important character, a young boy struggling with some sexual confusion of his own, is as awkward, gangly, and desperate for affection as Alex is. I actually wish Alex had been a “normal” girl or boy because the enormity of her “situation” dominated every scene, allowing little breathing room for the characters to transcend the roles as written. I believe it was the Variety reviewer who described XXY as a very good after school special. A bit harsh maybe, but not far from my own take.

    Secret Sunshine. I hate to write capsule reviews of films like this — sprawling, complex stories that pull off the remarkable feat of being simultaneously tragic, charming, inscrutable, and sublime. The tone of this thing could have collapsed at any moment; Lee Chang-dong is some kind of genius for pulling it off. Secret Sunshine is about a young woman, Shin-ae, who moves with her son to the small town where her now-deceased husband was born and raised. There she meets several locals, including a persistent suitor (Song Kang-ho in my favorite performance of the year), a pack of gossipy housewives, and a pharmacist who is convinced that Shin-ae would find true happiness if only she would turn her life over to Christ. After several plot turns that I refuse to spoil, Secret Sunshine becomes, among many other things, the truest depiction of evangelical Christianity I’ve seen on film. Fortunately, Lee’s film is not evangelical itself and, instead, wrestles with the strangeness and disappointments of faith in a way that The Mourning Forest, with its contrivances, could only mimic. Damn, I love this film.

    And speaking of wrestling with faith (which, by the way, is far and away the dominant recurring theme of this year’s festival, or at least of my programmed version of it). I’ve gotten in the habit of describing Saverio Costanzo’s In Memory of Myself as a genre film, a suspense thriller in which the central, driving mystery is faith. It might be strangest film I’ve seen all week, with shades of Kubrick and Dreyer and a formal rigor I wasn’t expecting and have yet to fully process. I honestly don’t know if it’s a good film but I enjoyed every minute of it. I’m reserving all judgment until after a second viewing, which I hope comes sooner rather than later.

    Hannes Schupbach’s Erzahlung is a commissioned portrait of Cesare Ferronato, an 80-year-old Italian sculptor. I’m a total sucker for films that document the artistic process, especially when they allow us to observe hands in action, but what most charmed me about this 40-minute, silent picture was its focus on Ferronato’s domestic life. There’s a wonderful moment, for example, when we watch him and his wife (I assume) play a game of chess. For Shupbach, there’s no distinction to be drawn between art-making and love and work and community — each is absolutely integral to the other.

    Seeing Heinz Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses on the massive screen in Varsity 1 was a real treat, but I really wish it had been programmed at any time other than 10 pm on Sunday night. I stayed strong for the first 75 minutes, but the last 25 are a bit of a blur. Fifteen challenging films in three days did me in. Schindler’s Houses is assembled from static shots of the homes and buildings Rudolf Schindler designed in and around Los Angeles between 1921 and 1952. They’re arranged chronologically and include both exterior and, in many cases, interior shots. The sheer quantity of footage has an interesting effect: Rather than the dusty curiosities you might find in a coffee-table collection of architectural photographs, the buildings shift and morph as they find new contexts. They’re domestic spaces that continually evolve to satisfy the tastes of their occupants. They’re material objects with material values (it’s impossible to watch the film and not be reminded of California’s real estate bubble). They’re objets d’art, relics of Modernism. Emigholz matches Schindler’s eye for composition; like Erzahlung this is another meeting of artists. As an aside, I would love to see a remix of this film using only shots of bookshelves (apparently a hallmark of Schindler’s designs). I have a fixation with browsing others’ bookshelves and found myself wanting to linger just a bit longer in front of those we see in the film.

  • A Few Words on . . .

    • Films Watched: The Battle of Algiers dir. by Gillo Pontecorvo; Down by Law dir. by Jim Jarmusch; Saraband dir. by Ingmar Bergman; 35 Up dir. by Michael Apted
    • Books Finished: Libra by Don DeLillo; The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation by Hayden White; The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
    • CDs Purchased: Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club; Pixel Revolt by John Vanderslice; Donnie Darko (soundtrack) by Michael Andrews

    Remember that episode of The Office when David Brent interrupts a training seminar to sing his ode to the free love freeway? The comedy in that scene is about a mile-and-a-half thick. There’s the typical embarrassment of Brent’s colleagues, there’s Tim’s disbelieving stares into the camera and Gareth’s interruptions (“She’s dead”), but what I most love about the joke is that Brent, a middle-aged paper salesman from Slough, has written — and is earnestly performing — a song about driving a Cadillac through the American southwest, bedding lovely “senoritas” along the way.

    Oh, dear lord, how I wish I could chalk up Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s new album Howl to an extended exercise in irony. Generally speaking, I avoid power-trio rock-and-roll, but BRMC’s last record Take Them On, On Your Own was one of my favorites of 2004. It’s heavy when it needs to be but also features melodic songwriting and great guitar noise. Howl, apparently, is their attempt at “roots” music. Acoustic guitars? Check. Harmonicas? Check. T-Bone Burnett credit? Check. Song titles that make confused, sepia-toned allusions to southern spirituality and Depression-era heartache? Check. Apparently these California boys turned off their Jesus and Mary Chain records just long enough to watch O Brother Where Art Thou seven or eight times, and now they’ve lost their way in the funhouse of Americana simulacrum. Fortunately, The Disc Exchange has a ten-day return policy, so I’ll be getting that New Pornographers album instead.

    The week wasn’t a total bust for new music, though. After spending most of the last month listening obsessively to John Vanderslice’s “Exodus Damage,” I picked up the new album, Pixel Revolt, and it’s a beaut’. Vanderslice is a story-teller. Okay, so that’s not terribly unusual. But he’s a story-teller who works in genres. For example, “Continuation” is a police procedural. Seriously, it’s sung by a detective who’s working a case. And it has a cello solo. You’re probably going to laugh at some point during the first twenty-two seconds of the song. Then Vanderslice will start singing, and by the time he hits the chorus, you’ll be tapping your foot and smiling.

    Still high from the Miranda July film, I also picked up a used copy of the Donnie Darko soundtrack this week. (Both films were scored by Michael Andrews.) Except for its inclusion of three, barely-distinguishable versions of “Mad World,” I like it a lot. Maybe instead of a Fender Rhodes, I should be on the lookout for a Mellotron.

    Another week, another book of critical theory, another postmodern doorstop. In The Content of the Form, Hayden White asks, “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” For White, the interpretation of history, like the acts of fiction-making and criticism, is a moral and political act. Reading White alongside Don DeLillo’s Libra made for an interesting study of theory and praxis. DeLillo’s “Author’s Note,” included on the last rather than first page, reads:

    This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.

    Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I’ve altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.

    Libra, in effect, is about the writing of history, the transformation of “real” events into a narrative. It’s a job, DeLillo implies, shared by novelists, historians, CIA analysts, politicians, and anyone else — Lee Harvey Oswald, for example — who writes themselves into human history. That’s an admittedly pedantic description of a novel that was honest-to-god fun to read. I was blissfully ignorant of the JFK assassination before picking up the book, so I was swept quickly into the various intrigues and conspiracies. I have no idea at this point how much of the novel is “real,” which, I guess, is precisely the point.

    If I watched fewer films this week, it’s because much of my spare time was spent parsing through the list of 256 features and 79 shorts that will be playing at TIFF this year. Again, I’m holding off on commenting on the 7 Up films until I finish them all, and I have a longer response to Saraband in the works, which leaves only The Battle of Algiers and Down by Law. I missed Algiers during its theatrical re-release a year or two ago, and I’m sort of glad that, instead, I was able to see it now, at some remove from Bush’s march to war and the prison abuse scandals. That Pontecorvo’s film was made forty years ago, and that America now finds itself in a situation so similar to colonial France’s (the same arrogance, the same disregard for history, the same dehumanizing mistakes), is just maddening. It’s almost too much to watch — and I mean that as the most sincere compliment. Again, Doug has two really fine essays on the film and the DVD release.

    Down by Law is also a great film, and for completely different reasons. What happens in Jarmusch’s film is irrelevant — three guys are arrested and make a jailbreak — all that matters is that it happens to three guys who are endlessly watchable. John Lurie doesn’t so much act as simply embody cool. In fact, I like him best when he’s standing still or functioning as the straight man. Tom Waits is Tom Waits is Tom Waits. And Roberto Benigni, despite what you might think of him after Life is Beautiful and the Oscars, has some kind of superhuman comic timing and this crazy gift for swinging effortlessly between mania and pathos.

    When I first mentioned Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, Bulb wrote in a comment, “I left [a copy] in my guest bathroom and it never fails to elicit favorable comments.” I don’t mind admitting that I read most of Spree two or three pages at a time. It’s great in small doses. Hornby tells us what he read, why he read it, and whether it was worth the effort, and he does so in a typically charming and insightful manner. I can’t write fiction. It’s a complete mystery to me. Which is why I so enjoy reading writers write about writing. Best of all, Spree has given me an unexpected and much-needed push toward the book shelf (and the blog).

  • La Notte (1960)

    La Notte (1960)

    Dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni

    Images: Opening titles are cast on nearly abstract shots of skyscrapers, grounding the film immediately in the modern landscape. Actors are frequently framed on opposing sides of the screen, alienating them from one another. Crowds are noisy and hostile, forcing characters to retreat to isolation for solace. Favorite images: the shame and self-conscious look on Moreau’s face when she models her dress for Mastroianni; Moreau walking with a straight back in her wet black dress after the rain storm.

    • • •

    I’m very fond of Edward Hopper’s painting, New York Movie. It’s a great piece of early American modernism, simultaneously revealing, like a Fitzgerald novel, both the techniques of realism and the disillusionment and moral decay of the “lost generation.” Like many of Hopper’s portraits, “New York Movie” features a lone woman — here, a young usher — who suffers in isolation. Her pain is evident in her body language, her closed eyes and slumped shoulders, but, more importantly, it’s communicated by the composition of the painting itself. The woman leans against a side wall, framed in the lower right corner, while the majority of the portrait is devoted to the mass of the public watching a film in darkness. Hopper positions her under a wall sconce that draws our eyes instantly to her shadowed face.

    A similar image occurs in the opening moments of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, when Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) stares out a hospital window, drawn there by the sound of a passing helicopter. Like Hopper, Antonioni composes the frame with his heroine in the lower right corner, alienating her completely from her surroundings. Despite the presence of her husband and her dying friend in the room, Lidia stands alone, here and throughout the remainder of the film.

    La Notte has little plot to speak of. Antonioni follows Lidia and her husband, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni), through the course of one night, as they wander the streets of Milan, visit clubs, attend parties, and, finally, confront the cold apathy that has developed between them. Both rebuff the sexual advances of strangers, but they seem to do so only out of obligation or respectful loyalty. They are certainly both attracted to the strangers, if only for the temporary connection and passion that they might offer. Giovanni’s attraction to Valentina (Monica Vitti) is mostly physical — he stares at her like he does the black dancers who perform for him in a club — though he, the shrewd intellect, would surely deny the accusation. Lidia is drawn to Roberto (Giorgio Negro) because he simply offers her his attention and respect, neither of which have been available from her husband for years. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, Lidia and Roberto sit alone in a car as rain falls around them. Antonioni remains at a distance, letting them laugh and talk out of earshot. It’s the only time during the film that we see Moreau’s smile.

    By examining in microscopic detail the workings of a marriage, that most essential of all human relationships, Antonioni extends his critique from the specific to the general, from the failings of a particular man and his particular wife to the apathy, solipsism, and alienation that plagues so much of the modern world. His is a world of towering mirrored skyscrapers, decaying brick alleyways, hostile, noisy crowds, and abrassive, intrusive technology, all of which send humanity fleeing to isolation for solace. With all that as its backdrop, the film’s finale plays like a grim satire of cinema’s cliched seduction scene. Lidia and Giovanni separate themselves from the crowd of party-goers (the Hopperesque framing returns once more) and make their way down a large empty field. They discuss their marriage in equal doses of bitterness, resignation, and denial, but finally admit that their love has atrophied. Giovanni’s response is interesting: he becomes emotional, but would probably be incapable of explaining why. Perhaps he is moved simply because Lidia’s confrontation has forced him to suddenly feel something, anything, for the first time in years. In what a less honest screenwriter would call a “fit of passion,” he lunges toward her to make love to her, while she whispers in his ear, “Tell me . . . Tell me.” That she wants to hear that he does not love her leaves the viewer with little hope for comfort.

    My only criticism of La Notte is that too often Antonioni leaves us alone with his characters for extended periods, forcing us to listen to them talk and talk and talk about the human condition or other such matters of self-importance. I recognize the necessity of such scenes, as they reveal (intentionally or not) the emptiness of a purely intellectual existence. But they feel redundant to me. Antonioni’s camera, particularly when it’s directed on the faces of Moreau, Mastroianni, and Vitti, speaks more articulately than his flawed but sympathetic characters ever could.