SYNOPSIS
L’eclisse (The Eclipse) is the most perfectly achieved and the most aesthetically daring of Antonioni’s black-and-white ‘trilogy’ of the early 60s, winning the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1962. The last film in the trilogy (which also includes L’avventura and La notte) L’eclisse is distinguished for its subtlety and variety of mood, and for the artistry of its images. A relationship breaks up, a new one forms and dissolves in its turn. But, as so often with Antonioni, it is not so much the action that counts as the events and non-events with which it is interspersed.
The narrative centre of L’eclisse is the love affair between the mercurial Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and the restlessly extrovert Piero (Alain Delon). They are not natural soul mates, they are not even matching opposites. So it is not surprising if their affair appears to have no future. What is surprising, however, is how much the film succeeds in conjuring up outside the narrative: the mindless frenzy of the Stock Exchange with prices in free fall; the utter peace of Vittoria’s trip to a small provincial airport; the passage of time while the camera waits at a rendezvous for which the lovers never turn up… L’eclisse is worth seeing for these sequences alone.
L’eclisse is also probably the film in which Antonioni’s central concern with the fragility of relationships in an alienated world is most rigorously expressed and where his painterly eye-view yields up its most crystalline and revealing images. A must-see on the big screen.
