THE ECLIPSE Movie Review

L'Edisse

Deciding that they have nothing more to say to each other, lovers Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) break off their affair; before long, Vittoria becomes involved with a swaggering young stockbroker named Piero (Alain Delon) who is working for her mother. The final chapter of the Michelangelo Antonioni trilogy that began with L'Avventura and continued with La Notte carries the director's concerns about the individual's sense of alienation in modern society to their logical extremes. The famous final sequence of the film doesn't even show us any human beings at all—just the location where we expect them to be and the space that surrounds them. Where such images in an Ozu film would indicate a world in balance with the characters about to enter the frame, the same images in The Eclipse imply a world in which human actions are no longer effectual—the landscape is the same, with or without people. It's a view of man's fate that's as bleak as they come, but expressed by an artist of extraordinary talent. If you've seen the first two films in this cycle, you may feel you've gone down this road far enough. Depending on your appetite for the director's world view, The Eclipse will either be the most uncompromising—or the most superfluous—of Antonioni's major works.

NEXT STOP … L'Avventura, La Notte, Zabriskie Point

1966 123m/B IT Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, Francesco Rabal, Louis Seigner; D: Michelangelo Antonioni; W: Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, Ottiero Ottieri, Michelangelo Antonioni; C: Gianni Di Venanzo; M: Giovanni Fusca. VHS TPV, MRV, FCT