Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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after that?” asks the boy, with perfect composure.
Identification of a Woman is over.
A CHANGE OF LIGHT
Nothing is ever lost in space: toss out a cigarette lighter, and all you have to do is to plot its trajectory and be in the right place at the right time, and the lighter, following its own orbital path, will with astronomical precision plop into your hand at the designated second. The fact that in space a body will orbit about another to infinity means that sooner or later the wreckage of any spaceship is almost always bound to turn up.
—Stanislaw Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot
But in the middle of this, there comes upon us an astonishing transition, one of those movements by which Antonioni (in various films) shows us that space is time. (Film is all transition, all continuity.) Space exists to be moved into, moved away from, moved through. When we care about people, we are curious about space because they exist in it: visiting Niccolò’s apartment, Ida says it’s him in this place she wants to see, not merely this place. When, like Niccolò, we are not so capable of caring about people (Mavi makes it clear to him that he needs her, but does not love her), it is objects moving through space that enchant us, and perhaps people become objects in this regard: the clay-pale asteroid-spaceship in Niccolò’s movie gliding through the dark intergalactic void toward the sun. Niccolò has been hunting for Mavi and has driven to the address that his friend at Time has provided. A narrow street, with old stone facades in front of which he can draw up his vehicle near the doorway to Mavi’s apartment building. After he has investigated the apartments, we see him leave the building, check out the neighborhood a little, get into his car, and drive away, off-left.
Now, the scene does not change by so much as the tiniest fraction of a degree, compositionally. The light fades some. He drives in from the right, and parks exactly where he had parked before.
This is a strange and delicious infusion of dimensions. The camera has been locked down, so that the frames match precisely. The road has undoubtedly been marked for the car’s position. And the cutting has been managed securely because the lighting conditions in the two parts of the shot are not so very different that a splice would be noticed; yet, at the same time, the day has clearly waned, hours have passed, between Niccolò’s departure and his return.
And between this departure and this return what seems a whole world is eclipsed. In the first sequence he is desperate, hopeful, eager, filled with the feeling that at last he has found her again and can at least expect an explanation for her sudden termination of their affair. When the occupants of the various apartments offer their various portrayals of ignorance about Mavi, he is increasingly doubtful, not so much about her presence in this place as about these agents. In the second sequence he seems possessed of a sad certainty, a knowledge he would rather not have but which, like a recurring melody, must be played out to its finale. In this transitional shot in the street, which has a magical quality because the editing is so seamless and because we cannot imagine how in so brief a spate of time a man who has just driven offscreen left can possibly be driving onscreen from the right, there is a sense in which time has a palpable essence, the same essence as that of light, and that as the light slowly drops away, time does the same, yet visibly. And in this tiny hiatus, of course, Niccolò travels the entire universe.
The evidence that lies before Niccolò before he drives away from Mavi’s building and the evidence when he returns are precisely the same: (a) a vague, rather ugly warning to “be careful”; (b) a fact: that someone else apparently has designs on Mavi; (c) another fact: this someone is at least connected to the voice of a woman who ordered the chrysanthemums; (d) the strange tale of the girl at the swimming pool; (e) Mavi’s curious self-regard during lovemaking, her libidinous passion, her general lack of interest in Niccolò and recognition that he lacks interest in her. The rest of what Niccolò is worried about is pure supposition: that the mysterious enemy has taken steps to disenfranchise his sister at the hospital; that this stranger attended the soirée and had an eye out for Niccolò, then fled; that the stranger means to do Niccolò, or for that matter anyone, harm. If his vanity were ripe, after all, he might well assume that the comment, “Be careful,” meant, “You are about to be endangered,” but that is not all it can mean.
Further, we are given direct reason to query the strength and fidelity of Niccolò’s troubled suppositions and fears. In that dense fog, when pacing outside the car he hears that there has been an incident at the river, with shooting, with the police, he leaps immediately to the conclusion—it is really astonishing how Antonioni leads us to be able to see this, by the expressions on his face, by his movements—that Mavi has jumped to her death, or been shot, or that she is involved in something horrific and indescribable. But Mavi has nothing to do with this, and is already—as we very soon discover—sitting back in the car, waiting for him with her cigarette. (Her cigarette that she does not really want to smoke, like all the cigarettes she asks for, and begs help in lighting, then quickly stubs out.) His terror, then, is rather like a fog that descends in an instant out of nowhere. For Mavi, if we look objectively rather than through Niccolò’s analysis, we can see that Niccolò has certain attractive qualities: he is well known and intelligent, if neurotic; he is a fine lover; he knows how to treat her to a pleasant time. Nor need any of this dislodge a certain trepidation she seems to feel in his presence throughout, as though, tasting gingerly from his cup of plea sure she is nevertheless always like a bird on point of flight, a bird ready to leave a nest. His attempts to frame her departure as a conspiracy are overdrawn: she is fragile and flighty in the first place. When finally she does disappear, in that morning at the country villa, it is not really alarming or surprising except to Niccolò, who—she was correct the night before in pronouncing—needs her more than he loves her.
If the evidence available objectively to Niccolò rests the same before and after his departure that afternoon from the precincts of Mavi’s apartment block, what accounts for the change in his view, his attitude, his expectation? How does his hopefulness become acceptance and detachment? He is not simply a man who returns for a second look to a scene where a lost article has not been found; he is another man altogether on his return, come to see a world he previously could not imagine. It can only be time itself that has changed him, or light, both of which signal the voyage around the universe that Niccolò makes in his little car while we wait, calmly, arms outstretched as it were, for the object that he is, having finished its revealing orbit, to return.
What, in the end, is this universe in which Niccolò has made his circuit as the scene subtly changes? One, clearly, in which if he orbits, he is yet a kind of sun, with creatures circling him like planets obedient to his pull. His sister has had her career either ruined or seriously interrupted, for all intents and purposes, yet his sole response is to see some reflection upon himself: that a nefarious stranger pulled strings in order to hurt him by hurting her. The thug eating ice cream in the café: it does not occur to Niccolò to actually listen to him, even though in all his utterances so far, in person and on the telephone, the man has been the soul of courtesy. He is only a brute, employed by another brute, who brings menace Niccolò’s way. The writing partner and chum Mario (Marcel Bozzuffi), who cannot imagine what kind of love story could possibly make sense in a corrupt world: for him Niccolò has little time or conviction, since only his own desire occupies him. “Corruption is what unites our country,” Niccolò says rather glibly, “and corrupt people are the first to want love stories.” Yet Niccolò does not see that his own immense attractiveness to others is a form of corruption, and that he is among those who are first to seek love. The women with whom he surrounds himself are certainly parts of his universe more than he is a part of theirs. Mavi, Ida, the girl at the pool, his former girlfriend, all of them exist in order to function, and function as potential subjects for his characterization. “Looking for a character means looking for contexts, facts,” claims he, but he does not look for the reality of their experience. Mavi becomes more and more important to him, though she has disappeared, because the riddle of her pursuer has not been solved, not because of anything intrinsically interesting to him about her.
In the end, Niccolò treats himself as the glowing orb being approached by the exploratory probe (who inhabits that asteroid-ship, what their intentions for the knowledge they will surely amass, he does not know), but it is the ship, in