Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ and then finds her again. The second, set in Portofino, puts a film director into the presence of a girl who draws him out of his meditations with a chilling story of having committed a killing. The third begins with a marriage in trouble in Paris, and continues with a strange and perhaps fortuitous meeting over a problem with real estate. The last, in Aix-en-Provence, has a young man meet a young woman who should love him, and who perhaps does, except that she has plans he cannot interrupt. In these episodes, we see the interwoven and dominant presence of movement counterpoised against tranquility; strangeness challenging the desire for contact; urbanity in the face of traditionalism; etiquette interplaying with urgency; communication either broken or made painfully ambiguous; seasonless merchandising; and the deeply horrifying possibility that our unitary relations have been slowly, methodically exploded over time so that it is only as fragments and with fragmentation of spirit that we may be condemned to lead our lives.

      For aficionados of Antonioni and devotées of this particular film, a brief apology, because there are parts of it I studiously avoid addressing here:

      Having suffered a massive stroke in 1985, Antonioni was exhausted and partly debilitated when it came time to shoot Beyond the Clouds. The insurers insisted on the presence behind the camera of a healthy and competent director. Out of friendship, Wim Wenders agreed to play this role, and eventually himself directed certain introductory, transitional, and concluding narrative passages or bridges involving John Malkovich in the film-director role of episode two: a scene in an airplane “above the clouds”; a scene at a windy lonely beach; a scene on a train heading into France; meditative scenes in the streets of Ferrara; scenes at the Hotel Cardinal in Aix-en-Provence; and a hilltop scene involving Marcello Mastroianni conversing with Jeanne Moreau as, painting Mont Sainte-Victoire, he attempts to recapture the inspiration that had seized Cézanne (and also the inspiration of Borges’s Pierre Menard, whose “admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” [66]). I work around these insertions by Wenders—which were photographed by Robby Müller (exquisitely, but not, I think, as Antonioni would have had them photographed) and written with a view to perhaps making more explicit the connections I cannot help but feel Antonioni would wish us to tease out on our own. That Wenders is paying homage to Antonioni is without question—in his diary of the shoot, for March 9, 1995, he writes of a particular shot, “He shoots it again and again, with tiny variations, as though to put off the end for as long as possible” (138)—nor can there be any doubt that the younger man held the older with the greatest of esteem and bore him a profound love. Yet for all this, he is not and was not Antonioni, and the interludes are distinct in every important way. In a proposed edit, writes Wenders, Antonioni sliced out almost all of the additions. “‘Leave my film alone! My stories don’t need any framing, they can stand by themselves.’ What he wasn’t capable of saying in words, he’s just told me in the form of his edit” (181). So I leave them to the reader’s pleasure, just as Cézanne’s mountain is left to the painter who must now find a way to regard it through another man’s eyes.

CARMEN AND SILVANO

       Portico

      Stone and stones. Receding from the camera, a long straight portico, with matched rows of cement columns topped by white plaster arches and a vaulted ceiling. A cobblestone walkway. Beside this to screen left, a road, bordering the modest green of what looks like a rugby pitch. Dense fog. Comacchio, the little Venice, town of more than a hundred arcades, near Ferrara, city of the House of Este; probably the Portico of Capuccini, in that late part of fall where winter can almost be seen.

      We are peering at the single, advancing lamp of a bicycle—a typically Antonionian view, recalling immediately how in his cinema we are given what Gilberto Perez calls “partial views of arresting partiality” (368); certainly a view that tends to “render the uncertainty of modern life with elegant exactness” (369). Then, on the road, a car (with two lamps) advances. “Gendered” vehicles, then, one showing twice the light of the other. The car stops and a young man (Kim Rossi-Stuart) jumps out, excusing himself rather gracefully just as the cyclist, a girl perhaps not quite as young as he (Inès Sastre), stops pedaling and turns to face him in the stillness. He needs directions to a good hotel: expensive or cheap, he trusts her. Just there—she points behind. As he walks back to his car she regards him carefully, then rides on, and with a quick turn he discovers that she is gone.

      Tall, thin as a whooping crane, expensively dressed in slate gray, he has long hair stylishly cut. Her long hair was neatly tied, and she had taken care to make up her face primly and cleanly. We will learn that he is an engineer, out here in the country on a job; that she is a teacher, cloistered until school closes, but under these measured, shady columns they were only a boy and a girl, a stranger and someone who knew the territory, someone who drove a car through the fog and someone who kept inside a portico making circles in the air with her feet. One searched only what he needed to know, the other was happy to be margined and marked, to guide herself in the columnar shade of art and civilization.

      There is no reason why we should wish or expect these two to meet again, except perhaps the intoxication of their beauty, which suffuses us with a desire they perhaps do not feel. Yet it seems instantly true that when these two are in one another’s presence they are (even lightly) bonded, a single twosome, not two solitudes, and that they work in a sensitive negotiation to produce what has been called a “togethering” (Ryave and Schenkein 269ff). Watching them as, tentatively, they hold this coupling, it is not difficult to be reminded a little of the conversation in Vertigo between Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster outside his house near Telegraph Hill, the day after he has pulled her out of San Francisco Bay, when, reading her thank-you note he smiles and says, “I hope we will, too.” She waits a moment. “What?” He waits half a moment. “Meet again sometime.” And she says, very matter-of-factly, “We have,” I think to underline that there is no reason for us to hope they will have another encounter. “Only one is a wanderer,” Madeleine tells Scottie, “Two together are always going somewhere.” That strange voice does seem to be echoing from the depths of Carmen (we will see that the subtle invocation of Vertigo is no accident.) Silvano and Carmen are distinctly not going somewhere, yet there lingers the idea that they ought to be, will be, must be—a connection born in a thought.

      He turns his car around, at any rate, and drives back the way he came.

       Etiquettes

      In a strange little scene Silvano checks in at the hotel: a scene that is strange in the way that only Antonioni’s scenes can be strange, seeming to go forward and backward in time and space at once. We are lingering in the forecourt as he enters a hazelnut green atrium and speaks to the innkeeper, a stocky man who gesticulates in a wearied, businesslike way. There are fancy iron bars over the door panes, such that our view is a little obstructed, and outside where we are positioned there is no telltale sign that proclaims this rather squat building a hotel. Room number 4, says the innkeeper, do you have any bags? The boy says they’re outside, then fluidly emerges to get them. The innkeeper gazes through the door but, losing this moment, we suddenly dissolve to the same lobby later on, our young man entering from outside as though from another world. The innkeeper is gone.

      “Time in Antonioni,” Perez notes, “is a time of the moment” (370). With a real ferocity, one can think to pass by way of a memory into a history long decayed, or, in the magical spasm of déjà vu, think to have spied in a faraway past a secret event that has only just now transpired. Outside, it is quite as bright as when the boy checked in. Have only a few seconds elapsed? Where has Silvano been that he should now be returning as though steeped in the traces of some exploration? And why did we not accompany him? This transition that signals a change of time and attitude conveys a sufficient instigation to believe something is different about the boy, something we cannot see (and that is therefore catching).

      He enters the breakfast room, where a man—one of those mushroom-colored souls who always fill the background when we СКАЧАТЬ