Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ Baudrillardian gauntlets, the crippling challenge of the simulacral world; and one of those piquant Lacanian projections, too, the problem of knowing the beloved apart from love itself, seeing the line between one’s conceits and the objective strangeness that confounds them. These are interesting riddles, but they do not describe Niccolò in this film as much, perhaps, as the viewer who is obsessed with them. The camera surely is beside Niccolò throughout, and we see the world as he sees it, a place without sharp discriminations. There is a tasteful, but also dulling harmony to colors and forms, as though everything has been managed into shape and all objects contrived to join one another in neat arrangements (the bed is always where Niccolò would like it to be, or better, where he expects it to be, because he is past finding sexuality an act worth appreciating). His friends, his family, his lovers, his business contacts, strangers he has never met before: with all of these he maintains a calm and even disinterested tone, quite as though they have been subjected to a ray that equalizes their statuses in his regard.

      As to that regard: it moves lethargically, like the monster from the black lagoon, yet also methodically, so that he can maintain clarity without interruption as he searches in all directions for a central feature, a sacred object upon which to fasten the fascination. Daily life is a chain of obstacles, weeds entangled around him as he strokes his way forward: the ineffable, unretrievable beeper that will disarm his apartment’s warning system; his sister’s complaints about her troubles at work; his little nephew’s innocent but also incessant demands for additions to his stamp collection; the inexorably stringent demand of Mavi’s secret lover—demand or provocation; Ida’s very fluidity, her ability to do everything, to sense everywhere, to love without hesitation. At a certain point “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” the world can become a locus of events, sensations, and encounters that are all—that are each—precisely and only matters of fact. Its romantic patina worn away, its charming gleam dissipated by a movement of the light, the wine glass is merely a vesicle, its contents merely a calculated distillation from grapes that endured a particular winter upon a particular slope. What had seemed sacred and mysterious, overwhelming, even irritable—the genitalia of the lover—become anatomical parts in an array; just as, with a subtle change of light, the mundane becomes evanescent. As Camus wrote, “What wells up in me is not the hope of better days but a serene and primitive indifference to everything and to myself” (39). Sitting in his window in the finale, Niccolò is bathed in an ethereal, holy light—light from the sun; yet at the same time he is merely illuminated, with more illumination than some objects (like the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, upon whom, says cinematographer William Daniels in Visions of Light [1992], a few extra foot candles were expended to make them “pop”) and less than others. He exists on a kind of scalpel blade between perfunctoriness and salvation, corruption and purity, the everyday and the unworldly. Because each term implies the other, every special instant invoking and requiring the mundane, it is also true that neither term is true. Neither mundanity nor sanctity survive outside the arbitrary judgments through which we mandate and create them. In the end, what confronts us is light.

      All things are connectable. Niccolò searches for his woman not as the center of his narrative but as the starting point from which he can join together the various threads that bind all things to all things. In that apartment building where Mavi has been hiding away with her girlfriend—her cool, even supercilious girlfriend; her brutish girlfriend (because it is this girlfriend who has hired the thug)—there appear to be a number of discreet apartments, but actually all of these spaces exist together, simultaneously, and each footstep taken by any person in any one of them echoes or contradicts a footstep taken above or below. Moral stricture, ethical suasion, aesthetic form, political mandate, economic imperative: all of these, at once, are ways of formulating and predicting the sorts of events that Niccolò is moving toward and away from, observing carefully, thinking through as possible additions to the story he wishes to make. When one has adopted a certain state of readiness, every discernable nuance is potentially raw material. It is not so much that Niccolò is apathetic, that he does not feel his relations with Mavi and Ida, as that he is obsessively devoted to the work at hand. He is continually, and inextinguishably, burning with the motive to narrate.

      And what is this story, this supreme construction? That a few dozen red chrysanthemums are delivered by hand. That one drives off into the night to escape from Rome. That a collaborator wonders about what kind of love story can be written in a corrupt world. That the swimmers move through a pool, while a strange girl watches them in self-absorption. That outside one’s window, in a pine tree, there is a birds’ nest, but no birds. The human presence, a ghost of sorts, inhabits this world and circulates among objects, caressing them with its intent. As Ida and Niccolò leave his apartment, they pass the concierge’s cubby and see half the chrysanthemums scattered on the floor: some ghost dropped them, the red flowers, perhaps it is me.

      BORED

      We no longer know how to see the real faces of those around us.

      —Camus, “The Desert”

      One difficulty that has beset viewers of this film, and confounded critics—“When it hit New York in 1982,” moans John Powers, “this elusive, challenging work received the kind of dismissive reviews more appropriate to Claude Lelouch than to one of the century’s great artists”—stems from the expectation that one should be watching vital, healthy people—especially if they are neurotic—who struggle ardently, even nobly, to make achievements we can detect and applaud: a transformation of the social arrangements that imprison the powerless, a transformation of space according to a new aesthetic, a transformation of the self. A film, then, about a personality who meanders and turns in circles, who stares out the window, whose encounters are systematically, repeatedly, emphatically fruitless? No. A man should be looking for a love partner, and find one. He should be solving a mystery. He should be erecting a pyramid. But Camus put it best: “Everyone wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions. A thousand voices are already telling him what he has found, and yet he knows that he hasn’t found any thing” (155). Niccolò has not reached his conclusions, and his search, which we must accompany, is exhausting, overwhelming. “You have found me,” says Mavi, in effect, and Ida echoes; as we presume the wife echoed, too, earlier, in another life. But he never finds Mavi, we only want him to. Never finds Ida. This film is not about the result or motive of a search, but about the search itself, its vertigo, sloppiness, unpredictability, passionate yet hopeless intensity. Given the incessant movement and complexity of the world in and through which Niccolò searches, it is perhaps obvious to say that he is bored. He experiences, that is to say, boredom in the most exquisite and high-minded sense of the term, a “nagging desire for something, the nature of which is forever hidden” (Healy 48; qtd. in Winter 28).

      It is not that Niccolò feels a yearning but does not know what it is that he yearns for. It is that he experiences desire, but cannot know its object. “In an instant,” he knows, with Vladimir and Estragon, “all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” This is what it is to be searching for form, reaching into the ether in every posture one assumes, combating that gravity, straining against convention and history, trying through the unilluminated void to see shape, not any shape but the singular shape that will give to one’s sensibility and memory, placement and purpose and potentiality. As Tennessee Williams’s poet Nonno writes in The Night of the Iguana:

      Sometime while night obscures the tree

      The zenith of its life will be

      Gone past forever, and from thence

      A second history will commence. (123)

      Niccolò is like this poet, but his mutterings are gazes; and the tone of his voice is in the way he stretches out his arm, the way he enters a room. The opposite of this boredom, this relentless but evenhanded search, is commonplace action: the partygoers, for example, carrying on trivial little conversations at the soirée as though it mattered what one said, as though one were actually being informative in adjoining СКАЧАТЬ