Eclipse

Eclipse has been criticized for lacking "life," and the criticism is justified. In his earlier films, Michelanglo Antonioni showed how frail and hard to communicate emotions can be. In Eclipse, he shows that they need not exist.

Even in the Stock Exchange scenes, the most lively in the film, people seldom behave honestly. Men go through a frenzied and grotesque routine, making and losing money and apparently doing no productive work. When they remain completely silent for a minute in an unfeeling memorial tribute, they are only behaving as unspontaneously as before.

Piero (Alain Delon), for example, a young stock broker, is hardly a "spontaneous" character, as the Brattle's blurb states. Whenever we see him, he is putting on a show--in the Stock Exchange, in his car, in his office. He might be watching himself in a mirror.

This self-consciousness keeps him from expressing gracefully any emotions he might actually feel and also from understanding anyone else's feelings. Vittoria (Monica Vitti) brings him to her mother's house and makes an innocent joke: she lies on her old bed--now much too short--and laughs gaily. Piero makes an ill-timed and unsuccessful pass at her and destroys her pleasure.

In fact someone always ruins Vittoria's little pleasures. Her larger desires are never even expressed; and no wonder, for which of the shallow and self-centered people she knows could she communicate them to? She has not put her feelings into words. When Piero questions her--not because he is interested in what she might say, but to keep the conversation going--she can only answer, again and again, "I don't know."

In L'Avventura, also, Claudia said that she did not know what was troubling her, but soon she realized that she was falling in love with Giorgio. Vittoria, however, certainly does not love Piero, although she does find him attractive. She tries to avoid all physical and emotional contact with him, and the love-making they do engage in finally is brief and unsatisfactory. Vittoria is not as unable to communicate as she is unwilling, for she fears the abvious solution to her problem: solitude.

Antonioni uses all his verbal and visual devices to show how his characters feel. Some of these become tiresome, like shots of people taken from behind lattices and fences. Others are more obscure and lead one into guessing games. But in the last scene, which for seven minutes pictures former meeting places of the pair, shows the emptiness of solitude. The sun is setting, but the director avoids heavy contrasts; the scene is a dull gray. If Eclipse--like its last scene--is lifeless, it is because it illustrates the difficulty not only of communicating, but of thinking and feeling and of living.