Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ (as they do us) but that have been designed explicitly to soothe strangers who can be presumed to require soothing. No childhood memories in common, no labor, no plan for the future. Their lives are structured and scheduled according to different principles, on different tracks as it were, and once the night has passed there is little possibility—little reason—for them to connect again.

      Two questions present themselves:

      Why in the middle of the night does the boy not steal into the girl’s room? No one else is around to disturb them, she is directly across the hall, there is no reason to doubt that she has desire but in any event she would extend him every grace and gentility even if she refused. Is he afraid of sex? The nature of the kiss shows he is not. This question becomes increasingly perturbing when we note how slowly and self-pleasingly she slips off her underwear and her stockings, how she moves upon the bed in the silk nightgown, conscious of her body and its sensitivities, and when we reflect that as a schoolteacher devoted to her students (the drawings on the wall) she might not have many opportunities for meeting men, especially young and attractive men such as this one. As to him: without getting directions from her, he would never have found this hotel. Why does he hesitate? Could it be that he is thinking of making love to her, imagining the sensation of her body against his, wandering through the corners of a pleasure that has not yet been his, anticipating it with such concentration that the imagined pleasure, swollen, overwhelms him? Could the etiquette and shyness which is holding him back, coupled with the beauty of the anticipation, not produce a state of affairs in which, for him, the thought of romance is more pregnant than the act?

      That is one. Another:

      Why should Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo be invoked, as, surely, it is? Scottie Ferguson has followed the salesgirl Judy Barton to her home in the Empire Hotel on Sutter Street, a shabby environment with a turquoise neon sign outside the window. Having cajoled her into allowing him to dress and style her (so that through her he may invoke Madeleine Elster, his former object of fascination and obsession taken too early in death), Scottie is waiting in her hotel room for Judy to return from the hairdresser, and as he stands to look out her window he is bathed in the light of the turquoise sign. It is the same “hotel” light that bathes Silvano for a moment as, standing outside her room, he contemplates the possibility of love with Carmen. Might it be that there was another woman for Silvano, before, in another life, and that she is dead or vanished; that Carmen has animated pungent memories of her, and that through Carmen the woman is haunting him? Amazed that he has found her, he fears that if he comes to her in the night he will be able to detect how she is different from the other, detect that she is only herself. Or he knows that if he comes to her, the actuality of the love will fail to match the anticipation. More chilling still: if he comes to her, he will learn that she is the other one, reborn. That the dead live. That he is making love to a ghost.

      (Antonioni knew and often reflected the work of Hitchcock, who was also charmed by memory in this way.)

      The green light may suggest that every love is a haunting, that every man at each moment with a woman is haunted by his memories of other women, by their persistence and reflection; or if not of other women then by his memories of this woman at some moment before, as she was when first he realized her. Every man looks backward, at any rate, while every woman looks to the future, and even though they seem to be staring into one another’s eyes they see at cross purposes.

      The green love in the green room, next to the green sign, has chilled him with remorse and fear, with deep need, to such a degree that he must hide from it in a pocket of selfishness. Or else, riddled with memories of loves gone awry, he must patiently make plans, think things over, decide whether he may permit himself to admit the feelings that possess him, as we can see, as we have already seen.

      The turquoise light that now bathes—if not his body—the thought of his thoughts: glyphs, parts of a word, something primordial. Frame lines of the French windows slice and interrupt the sign: interruption is modern. This sign is also reminiscent of another turquoise neon sign, in no known language, that illuminates the magical park setting in Blow-Up. In both cases, illumination emanates from, and constitutes, meaning itself: no message is conveyed but conveyance, a meaning that is meaning, the process of metaphor which is bringing (the fire) across the chasm. Not a particular metaphor, but metaphor: the possibility that one thing can be another. The fact that every thing already is what it is not.

       After a Film

      Two years later in another town. In a public hall a film screening is concluding. The film may be difficult for some viewers to identify, given that we see only the end credits and that these name only actors involved in an Italian dubbing, but Jonathan Rosenbaum gives it as Nikita Mikhalkov’s Urga (1991), a story of cultural and experiential tension between a shepherd and a truck driver. A single smokestack is seen in a long shot, rather similar to what is shown at the end of The Red Desert, where “birds learn that the smoke is toxic, and do not fly there anymore.” Carmen and a girlfriend are leaving, and so is Silvano, who discovers them in the courtyard, as if by “miracle.” “Nothing,” says Carmen a little archly, “happens by chance.” She is pointing to the force of modernity that guides and guards our lives, notwithstanding our innocent conviction that we are blown by the winds of fate. The two walk off, and find her apartment in a building that strikes him—wrongly, it turns out—as expensive. She makes it plain that a woman needs to hear words, and, in a more mundane light, that a boyfriend has recently broken off with her. For his part, Silvano walks around her simple apartment, gazes out the kitchen window, tries to nuzzle against her neck as he did in Ferrara. Once again, swiftly, she withdraws. Now, of course, it is impossible for him to gauge whether she is teasing or rebuffing and he chooses the conservative path, courteously taking his leave.

      We observe him walking down the echoing stone staircase outside her door. He stops and takes a beat: not an actor taking a beat, but a character taking a beat. “Maybe I misinterpreted.” Slowly he returns. Inside with her, he becomes passionate. They are unclothed. He is running his hands over her skin, yet not in such a way as actually to touch. His fingers explore, but remain a quarter of an inch away. When she jumps forward to take his lips he pulls back a little so that the delice of contact must remain a hope, an imagination. He dresses, walks out, passes through the colonnade downstairs and into the street, looking up and backward as from her window she follows him with her eyes. The tale of Carmen and Silvano is over.

      Why—how—does he not touch her? She is ready, she desires him. She is ripe. For one staggering moment she hesitated and held him off, but now it is evident she has made up her mind to forget that past, embrace the present as a road to some blissful, or at least stable, future. Silvano, however, lives in his reflections, nourishing himself with not desire but memory of desire. Also, he is unable to say his need, to make the utterance that constitutes a voice. Or: mute, his voice is only in his hands. How alone we are when we cannot speak across the incalculable void that separates us from alluring strangers, how imprisoned we are by our world when we cannot depict it. Perhaps, however, Silvano’s entire world has taken the shape of Carmen’s hungry body. Her body and his understanding have the same boundaries. In running his hands over her with such precision, such delicacy—Rosenbaum suggests that this scene “paradoxically makes one more acutely aware of the warmth of both their bodies than any conventional coupling would”—he is engaged exactly in speaking his world to her; and she cannot grasp what he is “saying” because she does not take herself seriously enough to presume she could be so much for him.

      At any rate, time has run out for them. (“Their diffident natures and the idealization of their romances prevent them from actually consummating and, thus extending their encounter,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter, coolly, as if without remorse [Byrge].)

      Yet it is also true that, failing to possess Carmen, Silvano nevertheless inhabits her, and she him. It is remarkable how intimate these two become, between glances, between phrases, in these quiet places, given that they basically СКАЧАТЬ