Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ eyeing him from the street. He escapes in his car, picks Mavi up, and flees with her into the country, where they are caught in a dense fog. She is frightened, and he is unsympathetic. She confesses her fear that she is being pursued by her mother’s lover, the man who spoke with her at the party, but in a flashback we learn that the man’s true purpose in drawing Mavi aside was to announce the shocking news that he is her father. Mavi and Niccolò drive to a villa he rented once, and to which he still has the key. But the place frightens her even more and she wants to leave. They make love. In the morning, he sees that two young women have in fact rented the place, and also that Mavi is gone. Back in Rome he searches for her, to no avail. He phones her mother’s house and the butler announces, “Niccolò Farra is on the telephone, searching for Maria Vittoria.” “Let him search,” the old lady replies. Mavi has gone off the map.

      Still, Niccolò thinks he is being haunted by a mysterious force that is drawing Mavi away. His sister comes with her son to visit, but is insufficiently sympathetic to suit Niccolò’s needs. The boy gets his postage stamps and is especially fond of a pair that show astronauts. “You should make a science fiction film!” says he. Niccolò hunts Mavi at a swimming pool, where he meets a young woman (Lara Wendel) whose sexual preference is masturbation, especially with someone who knows how to help her; and who admits to having slept with Mavi one night when the men they were with wanted to talk about soccer. Then Niccolò meets an old girlfriend, who agrees to spend a pleasant evening with him in town. She needs to find a place to pee, so they head toward a theater, where a young woman, one of the cast of the play, is disappearing inside. “Sexy,” says Niccolò’s friend. Later the same night, the old friend having left, Niccolò returns to the theater and meets this actress, Ida (Christine Boisson). They spend time together, especially at her villa on the outskirts of town where she keeps horses. He becomes her lover, and tells her all about Mavi and the strange case of being followed. A huge bouquet of red chrysanthemums is delivered for Mavi at Niccolò’s apartment; he sends them away. He goes off with Ida to her place, but soon she must go into town, only to return after several hours with the news that she has “found” Mavi, via an article in an issue of Time. How did she come by it? She went to the florist whose name was on the chrysanthemums, and found that they had been sent by a woman, probably the secretary of the person who had hired the man to follow Niccolò. And oddly, a copy of the magazine was at the flower shop. From an old contact, one of the editors of Time in Rome, Niccolò secures Mavi’s address, and drives there in his car. It is an apartment building with a marvelous curling staircase. He goes up and knocks on doors, one by one, but no one knows of Mavi. In one of the apartments he meets a young woman who regards him closely. He drives away but comes back in the late afternoon, this time climbing to the top of the stairs and waiting. Mavi enters the building and goes to the young woman’s door, but cannot find her key. He hears them conversing. “Niccolò is here, he came into the building,” says the voice from behind the door. Mavi looks up and sees him. She goes into the apartment and shuts the door.

      He becomes closer and closer to Ida, takes her to see the empty lagoon at Venice in the winter. In their skiff, on the waters which are as gray as dust and as sleek as silver, they embrace. Returned to their hotel, she gets a telephone call and comes to him elated. She is pregnant, has been since before they met. He responds coolly, it becoming clear immediately that for him this relationship has no future.

      Niccolò, finally, has made his film, about space explorers using an asteroid-ship to voyage near the sun in order to make calibrations. This ship is made of “a rare mineral, that resists a million degrees.” The little nephew’s voice asks why we go to the sun? “To study it,” Niccolò explains off-camera as we watch the asteroid approaching the great ball of fire. “The day mankind understands what the sun is made of … and the source of its power … perhaps we’ll understand the entire universe … and the reason for so many things.” “And after that?” asks the boy, with perfect composure.

      Identification of a Woman is over.

      A CHANGE OF LIGHT

      Nothing is ever lost in space: toss out a cigarette lighter, and all you have to do is to plot its trajectory and be in the right place at the right time, and the lighter, following its own orbital path, will with astronomical precision plop into your hand at the designated second. The fact that in space a body will orbit about another to infinity means that sooner or later the wreckage of any spaceship is almost always bound to turn up.

      —Stanislaw Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot

      But in the middle of this, there comes upon us an astonishing transition, one of those movements by which Antonioni (in various films) shows us that space is time. (Film is all transition, all continuity.) Space exists to be moved into, moved away from, moved through. When we care about people, we are curious about space because they exist in it: visiting Niccolò’s apartment, Ida says it’s him in this place she wants to see, not merely this place. When, like Niccolò, we are not so capable of caring about people (Mavi makes it clear to him that he needs her, but does not love her), it is objects moving through space that enchant us, and perhaps people become objects in this regard: the clay-pale asteroid-spaceship in Niccolò’s movie gliding through the dark intergalactic void toward the sun. Niccolò has been hunting for Mavi and has driven to the address that his friend at Time has provided. A narrow street, with old stone facades in front of which he can draw up his vehicle near the doorway to Mavi’s apartment building. After he has investigated the apartments, we see him leave the building, check out the neighborhood a little, get into his car, and drive away, off-left.

      Now, the scene does not change by so much as the tiniest fraction of a degree, compositionally. The light fades some. He drives in from the right, and parks exactly where he had parked before.

      This is a strange and delicious infusion of dimensions. The camera has been locked down, so that the frames match precisely. The road has undoubtedly been marked for the car’s position. And the cutting has been managed securely because the lighting conditions in the two parts of the shot are not so very different that a splice would be noticed; yet, at the same time, the day has clearly waned, hours have passed, between Niccolò’s departure and his return.

      And between this departure and this return what seems a whole world is eclipsed. In the first sequence he is desperate, hopeful, eager, filled with the feeling that at last he has found her again and can at least expect an explanation for her sudden termination of their affair. When the occupants of the various apartments offer their various portrayals of ignorance about Mavi, he is increasingly doubtful, not so much about her presence in this place as about these agents. In the second sequence he seems possessed of a sad certainty, a knowledge he would rather not have but which, like a recurring melody, must be played out to its finale. In this transitional shot in the street, which has a magical quality because the editing is so seamless and because we cannot imagine how in so brief a spate of time a man who has just driven offscreen left can possibly be driving onscreen from the right, there is a sense in which time has a palpable essence, the same essence as that of light, and that as the light slowly drops away, time does the same, yet visibly. And in this tiny hiatus, of course, Niccolò travels the entire universe.

      The evidence that lies before Niccolò before he drives away from Mavi’s building and the evidence when he returns are precisely the same: (a) a vague, rather ugly warning to “be careful”; (b) a fact: that someone else apparently has designs on Mavi; (c) another fact: this someone is at least connected to the voice of a woman who ordered the chrysanthemums; (d) the strange tale of the girl at the swimming pool; (e) Mavi’s curious self-regard during lovemaking, her libidinous passion, her general lack of interest in Niccolò and recognition that he lacks interest in her. The rest of what Niccolò is worried about is pure supposition: that the mysterious enemy has taken steps to disenfranchise his sister at the hospital; that this stranger attended the soirée and had an eye out for Niccolò, then fled; that the stranger means to do Niccolò, or for that matter anyone, harm. If his vanity were ripe, after all, he might well assume that the comment, “Be careful,” meant, СКАЧАТЬ