Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” [66]). I work around these insertions by Wenders—which were photographed by Robby Müller (exquisitely, but not, I think, as Antonioni would have had them photographed) and written with a view to perhaps making more explicit the connections I cannot help but feel Antonioni would wish us to tease out on our own. That Wenders is paying homage to Antonioni is without question—in his diary of the shoot, for March 9, 1995, he writes of a particular shot, “He shoots it again and again, with tiny variations, as though to put off the end for as long as possible” (138)—nor can there be any doubt that the younger man held the older with the greatest of esteem and bore him a profound love. Yet for all this, he is not and was not Antonioni, and the interludes are distinct in every important way. In a proposed edit, writes Wenders, Antonioni sliced out almost all of the additions. “‘Leave my film alone! My stories don’t need any framing, they can stand by themselves.’ What he wasn’t capable of saying in words, he’s just told me in the form of his edit” (181). So I leave them to the reader’s pleasure, just as Cézanne’s mountain is left to the painter who must now find a way to regard it through another man’s eyes.
CARMEN AND SILVANO
Portico
Stone and stones. Receding from the camera, a long straight portico, with matched rows of cement columns topped by white plaster arches and a vaulted ceiling. A cobblestone walkway. Beside this to screen left, a road, bordering the modest green of what looks like a rugby pitch. Dense fog. Comacchio, the little Venice, town of more than a hundred arcades, near Ferrara, city of the House of Este; probably the Portico of Capuccini, in that late part of fall where winter can almost be seen.
We are peering at the single, advancing lamp of a bicycle—a typically Antonionian view, recalling immediately how in his cinema we are given what Gilberto Perez calls “partial views of arresting partiality” (368); certainly a view that tends to “render the uncertainty of modern life with elegant exactness” (369). Then, on the road, a car (with two lamps) advances. “Gendered” vehicles, then, one showing twice the light of the other. The car stops and a young man (Kim Rossi-Stuart) jumps out, excusing himself rather gracefully just as the cyclist, a girl perhaps not quite as young as he (Inès Sastre), stops pedaling and turns to face him in the stillness. He needs directions to a good hotel: expensive or cheap, he trusts her. Just there—she points behind. As he walks back to his car she regards him carefully, then rides on, and with a quick turn he discovers that she is gone.
Tall, thin as a whooping crane, expensively dressed in slate gray, he has long hair stylishly cut. Her long hair was neatly tied, and she had taken care to make up her face primly and cleanly. We will learn that he is an engineer, out here in the country on a job; that she is a teacher, cloistered until school closes, but under these measured, shady columns they were only a boy and a girl, a stranger and someone who knew the territory, someone who drove a car through the fog and someone who kept inside a portico making circles in the air with her feet. One searched only what he needed to know, the other was happy to be margined and marked, to guide herself in the columnar shade of art and civilization.
There is no reason why we should wish or expect these two to meet again, except perhaps the intoxication of their beauty, which suffuses us with a desire they perhaps do not feel. Yet it seems instantly true that when these two are in one another’s presence they are (even lightly) bonded, a single twosome, not two solitudes, and that they work in a sensitive negotiation to produce what has been called a “togethering” (Ryave and Schenkein 269ff). Watching them as, tentatively, they hold this coupling, it is not difficult to be reminded a little of the conversation in Vertigo between Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster outside his house near Telegraph Hill, the day after he has pulled her out of San Francisco Bay, when, reading her thank-you note he smiles and says, “I hope we will, too.” She waits a moment. “What?” He waits half a moment. “Meet again sometime.” And she says, very matter-of-factly, “We have,” I think to underline that there is no reason for us to hope they will have another encounter. “Only one is a wanderer,” Madeleine tells Scottie, “Two together are always going somewhere.” That strange voice does seem to be echoing from the depths of Carmen (we will see that the subtle invocation of Vertigo is no accident.) Silvano and Carmen are distinctly not going somewhere, yet there lingers the idea that they ought to be, will be, must be—a connection born in a thought.
He turns his car around, at any rate, and drives back the way he came.
Etiquettes
In a strange little scene Silvano checks in at the hotel: a scene that is strange in the way that only Antonioni’s scenes can be strange, seeming to go forward and backward in time and space at once. We are lingering in the forecourt as he enters a hazelnut green atrium and speaks to the innkeeper, a stocky man who gesticulates in a wearied, businesslike way. There are fancy iron bars over the door panes, such that our view is a little obstructed, and outside where we are positioned there is no telltale sign that proclaims this rather squat building a hotel. Room number 4, says the innkeeper, do you have any bags? The boy says they’re outside, then fluidly emerges to get them. The innkeeper gazes through the door but, losing this moment, we suddenly dissolve to the same lobby later on, our young man entering from outside as though from another world. The innkeeper is gone.
“Time in Antonioni,” Perez notes, “is a time of the moment” (370). With a real ferocity, one can think to pass by way of a memory into a history long decayed, or, in the magical spasm of déjà vu, think to have spied in a faraway past a secret event that has only just now transpired. Outside, it is quite as bright as when the boy checked in. Have only a few seconds elapsed? Where has Silvano been that he should now be returning as though steeped in the traces of some exploration? And why did we not accompany him? This transition that signals a change of time and attitude conveys a sufficient instigation to believe something is different about the boy, something we cannot see (and that is therefore catching).
He enters the breakfast room, where a man—one of those mushroom-colored souls who always fill the background when we travel to strange places—is devouring something with a glass of water near a window. In a second room, Carmen is seated alone, modestly finishing her meal. She gets up as though instinctually and joins him at the window, says ciao. Something of a Narcissus, he is surprised. The beautiful thing, says he, gloating a little because he finds her attractive and is tickled that she is paying attention to him, is that he came here by chance. When, formally enough, she asks why it’s beautiful—since in her perfect pudeur she does not leap to the conclusion that she could be found attractive—he rattles on about how he was supposed to go somewhere else and at one point let the car drive him, a car that we may like to believe had a personality and will of its own. One can recall Fred Astaire captivated by Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon, taking her for an evening’s ride in a hackney cab and letting the horse decide where they should go. Fate enters human affairs through the body of a substitute: a horse or else a car so attached to one’s person that one has no consciousness of guiding it. Silvano’s car is a spirit blown by the wind, and so his meeting with Carmen is ordained by the gods.
Silvano makes to nuzzle against Carmen’s tawny neck and, charmed and a little excited, she moves off, her lips and sweater red as berries. Turning her head away from him, she reveals a light smile of satisfaction. They sit down at her table and smile into one another’s eyes. He thinks he has caught her. She knows she has caught him. But Antonioni will show, here and elsewhere in this film, what it means to catch, and how equivocal experience can be.
Meanwhile, what universe do we inhabit with these two adventurers, the modern one? A girl behaves in a courtly fashion, conscious of her own demureness as though it is a garment tailored to her form, while a boy gives the impression, perhaps without affectation, of having come on a quest, while on the highway behind them, that through its echoes and its racing flashes seems to dominate their space, those modern symptoms, movement and mechanism, are indicated forcefully with every speeding cipher. A man in blue punts down a little canal near the road, an emphasizing contradiction, medieval in every effortless stretch of his arms as he plies his pole. And is Silvano not a knight, with his invisible baggage and his air of privilege? The architecture was built in