Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ a second room, Carmen is seated alone, modestly finishing her meal. She gets up as though instinctually and joins him at the window, says ciao. Something of a Narcissus, he is surprised. The beautiful thing, says he, gloating a little because he finds her attractive and is tickled that she is paying attention to him, is that he came here by chance. When, formally enough, she asks why it’s beautiful—since in her perfect pudeur she does not leap to the conclusion that she could be found attractive—he rattles on about how he was supposed to go somewhere else and at one point let the car drive him, a car that we may like to believe had a personality and will of its own. One can recall Fred Astaire captivated by Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon, taking her for an evening’s ride in a hackney cab and letting the horse decide where they should go. Fate enters human affairs through the body of a substitute: a horse or else a car so attached to one’s person that one has no consciousness of guiding it. Silvano’s car is a spirit blown by the wind, and so his meeting with Carmen is ordained by the gods.

      Silvano makes to nuzzle against Carmen’s tawny neck and, charmed and a little excited, she moves off, her lips and sweater red as berries. Turning her head away from him, she reveals a light smile of satisfaction. They sit down at her table and smile into one another’s eyes. He thinks he has caught her. She knows she has caught him. But Antonioni will show, here and elsewhere in this film, what it means to catch, and how equivocal experience can be.

      Meanwhile, what universe do we inhabit with these two adventurers, the modern one? A girl behaves in a courtly fashion, conscious of her own demureness as though it is a garment tailored to her form, while a boy gives the impression, perhaps without affectation, of having come on a quest, while on the highway behind them, that through its echoes and its racing flashes seems to dominate their space, those modern symptoms, movement and mechanism, are indicated forcefully with every speeding cipher. A man in blue punts down a little canal near the road, an emphasizing contradiction, medieval in every effortless stretch of his arms as he plies his pole. And is Silvano not a knight, with his invisible baggage and his air of privilege? The architecture was built in the twentieth century no doubt, but on a Romanesque model. The walls of the breakfast room are chrysalis green. What imago, we have to wonder, is waiting here to be born?

      Once again they stroll along that portico beside their road, sunlight streaming through the archways. Their pace is casual but relentless, as though a riddle is to be worked out. He speaks of sunsets (in what one irked reviewer calls a “witheringly silly” line [Atkinson]). (Young people always want to have something to say.) They look up and see an icon of the Mother and Child appearing to bless them. Carmen talks about voices, suggesting that the voice is a creature, nervous, secretive. It’s strange, he muses, we always want to live in someone’s imagination; I like your eyes, completely empty of everything except sweetness. They kiss one another hungrily, and—oddly, because there is nothing of presence or intimacy that is not already given in the touch of these lips that have so artfully held back from intercourse with one another while still entreating and invoking so much with their hints of discourse—we approach, approach and judiciously examine, approach with hunger to see or know more. Then the scene fades, a conventional love story: that is, a story in which appetites are subject to etiquettes, in which conventions themselves are loved.

       The Kiss

      That we should approach, lean toward, that kiss! We have seen kisses onscreen before. For decades, they constituted the royal icons of cinema. Plainly enough, this one comes from passion, is erotic for both partners, surprises, and deeply pleasures. It escorts us to a new, or apparently new, depth. Yet, to learn this we need not dolly in. Does the camera movement perhaps provide explanation for—thus cover—our lingering interest in a sight that should normally seduce just a passing glance, for to let the shot run long with a steady camera might embarrassingly reflect a viewer’s attention back upon himself (even in the dark, where it cannot be optical relish for others, the rush of blood to the face is a palpable experience)? But the movement inward (or outward, away from ourselves, into ecstasy) produces in itself an interest and a payoff: not that something might be detected in the kiss with a closer view but as though the smooth gliding form of our fascination is a direct biophysical response to the kiss’s solicitation. We take leave of ourselves to kiss the subject matter of the film just as, smoothly and effortlessly, Silvano draws Carmen toward him in this kiss.

      “HOTEL”

      Dissolve. We discover our duo walking into the upstairs hallway of the hotel. She is leading him to her door. Centered in the frame is a pair of French doors giving out into the night, presumably over the forecourt, and through them we can see a bright turquoise neon sign, possibly “HOTEL”—it is visible only as a fragment—eerily agleam. (Only from inside, that is, do we see a sign that this is a hotel!) A shimmering reflection of this colored light is behind the boy’s back, around the doorframe of the room opposite Carmen’s. While she waits, he goes over to the French doors, opens them, steps out into the turquoise night, turning his face momentarily so that it is bathed in the rich undersea color. Then he steps back in, closes the doors behind him, says good night. Before going into her room, she follows him with her eyes, and we can see plainly enough that she is hungry for him. This is no dance of suspension and titillation for holding off the pleasure of a sexual encounter, for winding up the audience, but a careful and ritualized outplaying of fruitful ambiguity and doubt, the commonplace etiquette of modern life, when anticipations need not lead to resolution, when invitations need not lead to happiness.

      In his pale green room, with its comforting vaguely Scandinavian lacquered wooden furniture and brown wooden doors, Silvano stands undecided. In her pale green room, Carmen slowly undresses after turning on her television. Having doffed his overcoat, Silvano mops his face with a towel, muses for a moment, quickly turns and opens his door to scan her territory—maybe she has left her door open a little, a hint. Nothing. He closes his door and turns off the light. Carmen is pulling on a prim pink nightgown, oblivious to some drawings made by her very young students taped to the wall behind her next to a small framed landscape and the television. She sits on her bed thinking (presumably of Silvano): “What is he doing? When will he come? What will he look like when we are warm together, when his neutral gray skins are slivered off?” She is certainly not thinking, “Curious, unappetizing man.” Antonioni’s skill is to give us what feels like certainty about the most intrinsic and private realities—what they are musing, each of them, alone—while also showing these realities to be unimportant, insubstantial. Silvano is sitting on his bed fully clothed while we hear a car pass by outside. He stretches out, pulls a blanket over himself, shows some anxiety as the scene slowly fades. In the morning, from above, we look down on him still asleep as cars pass one another on the busy road outside and someone sounds a horn. He rises in a trance but while tying his shoes seems suddenly to remember a girl … a girl who spoke of voices and kissed him. He moves out quickly to check for her. She has gone.

      He asks the concierge to buy her some flowers. But it’s too late. Carmen and Silvano do not find one another again.

      Two or three years go by.

      In the modern world, which is the world in which yesterday has no hold upon tomorrow, the constant and enervating circulation that throws strangers against one another without introducing them produces a situation described by Georg Simmel, in which we experience a particular fear or perplexity that comes with seeing people we cannot hear (“Visual Interaction”). Carmen had told her knight earlier, “Voices never become part of you like other sounds.” She says you end up not hearing the sea, for instance, but “a voice you can’t help listening to.” Yet at the same time, these two say very little to one another, afford one another only briefly and superficially the opportunity to hear and know each other’s voice. They seem continually to pass like cars on a road, in a reflex that materially embodies our modern experience of social relationship: we see others without knowing them, relate to them only in a specific and particular way, applying ourselves to only a slice of their capacity and being. These two have no grounding beyond the hotel in which they spent the night, a dazed, neutral experience of the cars speeding by on the road СКАЧАТЬ