Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ we are given direct reason to query the strength and fidelity of Niccolò’s troubled suppositions and fears. In that dense fog, when pacing outside the car he hears that there has been an incident at the river, with shooting, with the police, he leaps immediately to the conclusion—it is really astonishing how Antonioni leads us to be able to see this, by the expressions on his face, by his movements—that Mavi has jumped to her death, or been shot, or that she is involved in something horrific and indescribable. But Mavi has nothing to do with this, and is already—as we very soon discover—sitting back in the car, waiting for him with her cigarette. (Her cigarette that she does not really want to smoke, like all the cigarettes she asks for, and begs help in lighting, then quickly stubs out.) His terror, then, is rather like a fog that descends in an instant out of nowhere. For Mavi, if we look objectively rather than through Niccolò’s analysis, we can see that Niccolò has certain attractive qualities: he is well known and intelligent, if neurotic; he is a fine lover; he knows how to treat her to a pleasant time. Nor need any of this dislodge a certain trepidation she seems to feel in his presence throughout, as though, tasting gingerly from his cup of plea sure she is nevertheless always like a bird on point of flight, a bird ready to leave a nest. His attempts to frame her departure as a conspiracy are overdrawn: she is fragile and flighty in the first place. When finally she does disappear, in that morning at the country villa, it is not really alarming or surprising except to Niccolò, who—she was correct the night before in pronouncing—needs her more than he loves her.

      If the evidence available objectively to Niccolò rests the same before and after his departure that afternoon from the precincts of Mavi’s apartment block, what accounts for the change in his view, his attitude, his expectation? How does his hopefulness become acceptance and detachment? He is not simply a man who returns for a second look to a scene where a lost article has not been found; he is another man altogether on his return, come to see a world he previously could not imagine. It can only be time itself that has changed him, or light, both of which signal the voyage around the universe that Niccolò makes in his little car while we wait, calmly, arms outstretched as it were, for the object that he is, having finished its revealing orbit, to return.

      What, in the end, is this universe in which Niccolò has made his circuit as the scene subtly changes? One, clearly, in which if he orbits, he is yet a kind of sun, with creatures circling him like planets obedient to his pull. His sister has had her career either ruined or seriously interrupted, for all intents and purposes, yet his sole response is to see some reflection upon himself: that a nefarious stranger pulled strings in order to hurt him by hurting her. The thug eating ice cream in the café: it does not occur to Niccolò to actually listen to him, even though in all his utterances so far, in person and on the telephone, the man has been the soul of courtesy. He is only a brute, employed by another brute, who brings menace Niccolò’s way. The writing partner and chum Mario (Marcel Bozzuffi), who cannot imagine what kind of love story could possibly make sense in a corrupt world: for him Niccolò has little time or conviction, since only his own desire occupies him. “Corruption is what unites our country,” Niccolò says rather glibly, “and corrupt people are the first to want love stories.” Yet Niccolò does not see that his own immense attractiveness to others is a form of corruption, and that he is among those who are first to seek love. The women with whom he surrounds himself are certainly parts of his universe more than he is a part of theirs. Mavi, Ida, the girl at the pool, his former girlfriend, all of them exist in order to function, and function as potential subjects for his characterization. “Looking for a character means looking for contexts, facts,” claims he, but he does not look for the reality of their experience. Mavi becomes more and more important to him, though she has disappeared, because the riddle of her pursuer has not been solved, not because of anything intrinsically interesting to him about her.

      In the end, Niccolò treats himself as the glowing orb being approached by the exploratory probe (who inhabits that asteroid-ship, what their intentions for the knowledge they will surely amass, he does not know), but it is the ship, in truth, that is his. Well protected against harmful radiation, he seeks proximity to a sun that we may imagine as the quintessence of feeling in female form.

      The former girlfriend has a lesson of sorts that Niccolò is unable to apprehend when, wanting to find a place to pee, she walks with him up the steep dark steps toward the theater. “I think you’re happy,” says she, “when your body is in tune with your thoughts. Mine is used to being near fields, rivers, trees, frost. Thoughts are different there from thoughts in the city. The laws of nature don’t count here, and I feel … empty.” The body, then, is part of a physical world, subject to temperatures, winds, visions, colors, textures, waves, obstructions, objects. But Niccolò is an obsessive, persistently unaffected by the physical scene, persistently concentrating on locating his “woman,” a character with whom he can be “silent” and “have with her the kind of relationship one has with nature.” Underneath that villa he imagines is still his, to which he brings Mavi out of the fog, is a Roman atrium, and when he takes her down there, coolly disinterested in history and locale, he is moving to another universe, but without consciousness. She is terrified by a flying creature—perhaps a giant bat, more likely an owl. He seems not to have noticed.

      BLIND KNOWLEDGE

      Our words become increasingly impenetrable.

      —Niccolò to Mario

      As Alain Bergala points out, Mavi and Ida both keep secrets, and so identifying them is a matter of difficulty (part of what makes this film, for John Powers, merely “another evaporating detective story”). In this they typify any “other,” who is unknowable because in possession of an inaccessible inner life: Niccolò’s struggle to know them, for the purposes of either love or characterization, represents any person’s work at intersubjectivity. Mavi knows, but does not reveal, the shape of her desire. Ida does not know she is pregnant when she takes up with Niccolò, but she suspects it, and has clearly planned going for the test the results of which are announced in Venice. (Mavi is the one who makes an appointment to see a gynecologist, Niccolò’s sister.) Nor does their secrecy exhaust the impenetrability of the film. Barriers to understanding are everywhere around, especially for Niccolò, so that he must send out interrogatory probes into social space to investigate the foreign bodies that hover before him in order to have any hope of increasing his knowledge, rounding off his understanding. Niccolò himself does not grasp his own working method, except to say he wishes to find a certain kind of woman. He certainly does not understand the confusions that beset him as he searches for this ideal character.

      Every action is something of a question for Niccolò, every step a possible augmentation of experience. Yet at the same time, every presentation is a riddle. Mavi has bathed and is drying herself with a carmine red towel. She notices, high on her thigh, cellulite, and comments that a woman her age shouldn’t have that, yet she does. How to interpret this? Does she, for instance, have knowledge about the cause of cellulite, and is she suggesting that something in the way life is lived today favors women developing this—in short, telling us that she is like many young women, all different than their mothers were at their age? Or is she puzzled, because all her friends have smooth skin and she cannot imagine how this happened to her? Is she concerned about herself, or is she thinking that perhaps Niccolò will notice and find the ripples unattractive? Is she making a light-hearted comment, or a humorous reflection on her own condition—saying she is older than she feels? Niccolò is listening carefully to her, perhaps too carefully. Indeed, at the party scene he chides her at one point for not taking seriously something he’s said and gives a tiny lecture: “Mavi, we must listen to one another.” As he listens, what does—what could—he apprehend that is of any use to him in deciding where he will go next, or what he will do? To be extremely sensitive to one’s universe is a kind of (delicious) passivity, a force that makes one stand in a doorway with eyes wide open drinking in the pleasures of a soirée but unable to move. Situated human action, after all, shares with other instances of organized production a reliance not only on appropriate materials, available spaces, and talented performers but also on knowledge, or at least what simulacrum of knowledge seems sufficient and credible. And just СКАЧАТЬ