L'Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni may well be the pinnacle of what I just termed "make-you-work-for-it" cinema. The idle viewer of an Antonioni film is invariably the deadly bored viewer. Not that his plots are overly complicated or complex. For that matter, he usually maintains a linear narrative. But he is a distinctly modernist filmmaker who works more off of negative space than positive which can often enrage, confound, or bore the viewers. Yet he's so damn good. This film concludes what is loosely referred to as his trilogy of alienation which began with L'Avventura and continued with La Notte (which I have yet to see). The film opens with a nearly 20-minute sequence in which a man a woman sit silently in a room. The woman moves around the room, seeming a little bit anxious. They are lovers, and by the end of the sequence she has left him. Later she meets a young, callous stockbroker played by Alain Delon, and begins a relationship with him. It finally ends in a sequence the likes of which greatness is made of. It's a cold film, but doesn't pretend to be otherwise, though may ultimately lack the resonance of L'Avventura (with the exception of the ending sequence). Antonioni knows how to use the camera -- so well, in fact, that it almost hurt me to watch, it was so perfectly conceived. His actors speak volumes yet there is only a minimal amount of dialogue and they almost never break out an expression, yet he know how to photograph them in such a way the camera provides the performance, and that's the point. It's a film about alienation.