Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ way of the thick glass. Although he’s been phoning for days, she won’t say much. “Vase … fleurs … couleurs … beauté …” And we all fall into the trap, she adds: the old, old story. There is such a resignation in her voice, as though being trapped is the main preoccupation in life (the philosophy of Norman Bates: trap as modern condition). He says (in English) that it’s sad to see her like this, “drinking, drunk, desperate.” They’re on the vanilla-cream bed. He protests that he was on a trip. (Didn’t you take her?) He didn’t take anyone. She bites him, then laughs. “Last night,” says he—this would be a confession in virtually any other circumstance, but here it seems a banality and a ploy—“Last night, I realized how much I miss making love to you.” A difficult admission, since it implies and invokes nostalgia, the ability to carry traces of an experience across time and space and a dangerous state of affairs when mobility is at stake. She climbs on top. “I’ll come back if you leave her.” “Today,” says he, surrendering, “This morning, now, right now.” As they kiss, she murmurs, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,” again and again, through tears, “Ne me laisse pas,” a mantra but also a child’s song. “Ne me laisse pas, ne me laisse pas. Ne me laisse pas.” Traffic is moving on a boulevard, people leaving people, even as the echo of her plea wears thin. Indoors again, watching the (same?) cars, the man turns to his lover, who, in a silver slip against a blue wall and next to a painting of a blue man hanging upside-down in agony, pouts, “Do you still make love behind my back?”

      He is both alluring and lured. She wants to know if he has told the wife he will leave her. Today I pitied her, says he and she stamps her foot on the ground breaking into a bitter and impatient sob. As he moves across the room in a long shot we notice that in the painting there is a second figure, a line sketch, sitting on the ground and staring out at the viewer. “For three years you’ve been bringing her smell here,” she barks, “the stale smell of a cheated wife!” They fight, and he throws her onto her bed (a tangerine-and-white checkerboard duvet), tears off her panties and her platinum slip to reveal her tiny, pert breasts and hungry thighs, brings himself toward her belly and then her crotch as her legs spread and the scene fades. Desire is not only a fuel, it is a vehicle.

      A car. It pulls up outside a decidedly modern apartment building on the Right Bank, and Carlo (Jean Réno) is delivered with an expensive black valise. Tall, purposeful, maybe a pilot. He enters, takes the lift upstairs (in the company of a girl who cannot take her eyes off him), lets himself into his pied-à-terre with a blasé sense of ease. But: the place has been cleaned out, almost every piece of furniture removed, and the gleaming parquet floors are an accusation. The huge plate glass windows all round present Paris as a bleak mist. In a closer shot, we see the man’s seriousness, his well-tanned but perturbed visage. Outside, the city is brighter, white and domed, rather like Durrell’s Alexandria—“A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive” (Durrell 54). Jars and boxes of food have been arranged neatly—too neatly—on the floor. The phone rings, rather persistently. When he answers, we hear the voice of his wife remonstrating with him for being so long away. “You emptied the place?” says he. “You could have left a note!” she answers. “It’s because of my work!” he explodes. She says, “Don’t try to find me.” This is the title of the story from which Antonioni made this section of his film. “One afternoon she comes home with a truck, loads it with some furniture and two suitcases, and leaves. Without a whisper, almost stealthily. An hour later on the telephone she tells him why. At any other moment he would have known what to answer” (Tiber 204). Furious, Carlo stands by the window and we hear a steady rain falling. He throws himself disconsolately onto a black leather chair. We cut to a shot looking down on him in his midnight blue suit and black t-shirt as he rises from the chair after his nap, paces around to the sound of a siren in the street, Ee-or ee-or ee-or ee-or, finds a torn photograph on the floor of beautiful Claire, naked, trailing a pepper red scarf over her crotch, staring languidly or haughtily into the camera. She’s a peppery one, and this is how she had the guts to pick up and vamoose. He’s assembled the pieces of the picture, gashes in the photographic paper slashing across her mouth and breast, but now the doorbell sounds. When he opens, he finds Patrizia in a chocolate ganache overcoat and with her oxblood leather bags. “Madame est là?—” Next to her feet a framed orange print has been standing on his floor: the black shape of a woman’s head, closely shorn, looking away. “—I spoke to her about renting the place.” Carlo is nothing if not confused, says it was undoubtedly his wife’s idea, that personally he is not sure he agrees. She walks in anyway, rather as though, at this moment, he suddenly does not exist, looks around, puts her bags next to his black chair, sits to appreciate the space, the view: “Don’t say that or I’ll go crazy.” She tells him the story of her marriage. The door again, this time probably it’s the furniture movers, bringing her husband’s furniture. She has taken off her coat and stands in a vanilla-white suit. She walks around the stripped bed, goes into the bathroom, turns, stares back at him through a thick plate glass partition. “I guess I’ll have to go away again,” says he, “I was planning to stay put … Maybe that’s why she went to live with him.” She recognizes that he, too, is in a precarious position. He shows her the torn photograph. The phone rings, not so persistently. This time it’s for her. She listens for a moment, then says into the receiver, “Don’t try to find me.” Looks around, a cat establishing its territory. “There’s a cure for everything,” says he, and she tells him it’s this that disturbs her. They hold each other’s hands. The rain has stopped.

      Change proceeds at such a pace that adults are disconnected from the sentiments of their own childhood. One is continually meeting people, continually thrust into the close proximity that makes possible readings of human intent and alignment. If the universe has not yet been evacuated of its aesthetic qualities—in Antonioni the universe is invariably such a place—the proximity invokes a kind of erotic studiousness, with the result that people are often, if swiftly, appraising one another and presenting themselves as possible partners in physical adventure. The contract, constraint, and discipline of marriage are a contradiction of the speeding allure of the world, and the characters we meet in this episode are all, to some degree or other—Carlo perhaps least, yet still appreciably—projected into the air that surrounds things, caught in transit as they move through the social space that supports their commitments and perceptions. The constant movement leaves emotion behind, replaces it with promise. Thus it is that we can be said to be marching ahead too quickly, to have left our souls behind, if our souls are our capacities for feeling and wonder. However, there is no practical way to stop and wait “until the souls catch up,” since territory itself has gained a new complexion as a space through which advancement can be achieved rather than a place of habitation. Locomotion has replaced habitation, anticipation has replaced experience.

      When Patrizia moans “Ne me laisse pas!” she is surely already imagining a number of possible future considerations, that the American might disappear, as for three years now he has been threatening to; that she might be the one who does the leaving (as turns out to be the case). The “don’t leave me” is an utterance in regard to future possibility, not an outgrowth of present experience, a prayer not an observation, since at the moment he is comfortably wrapped in her arms and she in his. Even in warmth she can imagine the chill of motion. The chill of motion dominates her life. She and her husband are culturally, emotionally, and psychologically passengers, “human parcels who dispatched themselves to their destination” (Schivelbusch, Journey 38–39).

      Everyone in this tale possesses or regards framed paintings or lithographs, and the artwork bespeaks the condition of those who exhibit it at the moment we see them. Perhaps the reflection is of a permanent or enduring condition. Carlo is perennially confronted with the back of a woman, a woman receding, a woman in departure, and this is why, although he is perturbed and angry, he is neither impossibly confused nor shocked. The young lover is perpetually in the presence of an inverted figure in agony or a watcher, perhaps always herself suspended in hunger or staring uncomprehendingly at the world. And Patrizia is to some degree always haunted СКАЧАТЬ