Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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or vanished; that Carmen has animated pungent memories of her, and that through Carmen the woman is haunting him? Amazed that he has found her, he fears that if he comes to her in the night he will be able to detect how she is different from the other, detect that she is only herself. Or he knows that if he comes to her, the actuality of the love will fail to match the anticipation. More chilling still: if he comes to her, he will learn that she is the other one, reborn. That the dead live. That he is making love to a ghost.
(Antonioni knew and often reflected the work of Hitchcock, who was also charmed by memory in this way.)
The green light may suggest that every love is a haunting, that every man at each moment with a woman is haunted by his memories of other women, by their persistence and reflection; or if not of other women then by his memories of this woman at some moment before, as she was when first he realized her. Every man looks backward, at any rate, while every woman looks to the future, and even though they seem to be staring into one another’s eyes they see at cross purposes.
The green love in the green room, next to the green sign, has chilled him with remorse and fear, with deep need, to such a degree that he must hide from it in a pocket of selfishness. Or else, riddled with memories of loves gone awry, he must patiently make plans, think things over, decide whether he may permit himself to admit the feelings that possess him, as we can see, as we have already seen.
The turquoise light that now bathes—if not his body—the thought of his thoughts: glyphs, parts of a word, something primordial. Frame lines of the French windows slice and interrupt the sign: interruption is modern. This sign is also reminiscent of another turquoise neon sign, in no known language, that illuminates the magical park setting in Blow-Up. In both cases, illumination emanates from, and constitutes, meaning itself: no message is conveyed but conveyance, a meaning that is meaning, the process of metaphor which is bringing (the fire) across the chasm. Not a particular metaphor, but metaphor: the possibility that one thing can be another. The fact that every thing already is what it is not.
After a Film
Two years later in another town. In a public hall a film screening is concluding. The film may be difficult for some viewers to identify, given that we see only the end credits and that these name only actors involved in an Italian dubbing, but Jonathan Rosenbaum gives it as Nikita Mikhalkov’s Urga (1991), a story of cultural and experiential tension between a shepherd and a truck driver. A single smokestack is seen in a long shot, rather similar to what is shown at the end of The Red Desert, where “birds learn that the smoke is toxic, and do not fly there anymore.” Carmen and a girlfriend are leaving, and so is Silvano, who discovers them in the courtyard, as if by “miracle.” “Nothing,” says Carmen a little archly, “happens by chance.” She is pointing to the force of modernity that guides and guards our lives, notwithstanding our innocent conviction that we are blown by the winds of fate. The two walk off, and find her apartment in a building that strikes him—wrongly, it turns out—as expensive. She makes it plain that a woman needs to hear words, and, in a more mundane light, that a boyfriend has recently broken off with her. For his part, Silvano walks around her simple apartment, gazes out the kitchen window, tries to nuzzle against her neck as he did in Ferrara. Once again, swiftly, she withdraws. Now, of course, it is impossible for him to gauge whether she is teasing or rebuffing and he chooses the conservative path, courteously taking his leave.
We observe him walking down the echoing stone staircase outside her door. He stops and takes a beat: not an actor taking a beat, but a character taking a beat. “Maybe I misinterpreted.” Slowly he returns. Inside with her, he becomes passionate. They are unclothed. He is running his hands over her skin, yet not in such a way as actually to touch. His fingers explore, but remain a quarter of an inch away. When she jumps forward to take his lips he pulls back a little so that the delice of contact must remain a hope, an imagination. He dresses, walks out, passes through the colonnade downstairs and into the street, looking up and backward as from her window she follows him with her eyes. The tale of Carmen and Silvano is over.
Why—how—does he not touch her? She is ready, she desires him. She is ripe. For one staggering moment she hesitated and held him off, but now it is evident she has made up her mind to forget that past, embrace the present as a road to some blissful, or at least stable, future. Silvano, however, lives in his reflections, nourishing himself with not desire but memory of desire. Also, he is unable to say his need, to make the utterance that constitutes a voice. Or: mute, his voice is only in his hands. How alone we are when we cannot speak across the incalculable void that separates us from alluring strangers, how imprisoned we are by our world when we cannot depict it. Perhaps, however, Silvano’s entire world has taken the shape of Carmen’s hungry body. Her body and his understanding have the same boundaries. In running his hands over her with such precision, such delicacy—Rosenbaum suggests that this scene “paradoxically makes one more acutely aware of the warmth of both their bodies than any conventional coupling would”—he is engaged exactly in speaking his world to her; and she cannot grasp what he is “saying” because she does not take herself seriously enough to presume she could be so much for him.
At any rate, time has run out for them. (“Their diffident natures and the idealization of their romances prevent them from actually consummating and, thus extending their encounter,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter, coolly, as if without remorse [Byrge].)
Yet it is also true that, failing to possess Carmen, Silvano nevertheless inhabits her, and she him. It is remarkable how intimate these two become, between glances, between phrases, in these quiet places, given that they basically do not unite. Perhaps they will not forget one another, but they are on the move, he onward and out of her life, she, at her window, to the destination of all those unknown folk whom we meet through a glance as they shuttle toward something we will never see.
A DIRECTOR IN PORTOFINO
Before
A film director (John Malkovich), who talks to himself rather articulately about a film he is thinking of making, goes to Portofino with a character in mind, and one morning in a little shop by the water, where the choppy green Ligurian sea is slopping onto a quay, and when the shutter has been lifted and the door unlocked, he finds a young woman (Sophie Marceau). She is, we must say, “perfect.” Her eyes are hazel, her hair long and evanescent; she wears a taupe suit, she looks at him looking at her and shows anticipation, as though his gaze has made her catch her breath. Later, they talk at a pink café spread with green-and-white chairs under lush green trees, and it’s misty. She’s arrived in blue slacks and a beige coat over a fisherman’s sweater, having told an English boyfriend in a yellow slicker to get lost. “It’s better that I speak to you plainly. whatever you have in mind, I’d better tell you who I am,” says she, announcing a little sententiously that she stabbed her father twelve times. She holds her breath some, speaks without any particular expression. We hear the water splashing in. She is looking out to sea. She walks away a few paces, and a cat sits and placidly watches her. “When?—” he asks calmly. Far too calmly. Only John Malkovich ever exhibits this calm in the face of horror, onscreen. For three months, she replies, they kept her in prison, and then she was acquitted. She will not say why she did it, but he surmises that he knows, and also that twelve times is “more domestic” and “more familiar” than two or three would have been. All the while we see the charming little village, its houses piled vertically up the lush green hill all the way out of this world, the crisp but at the same time overcast sky, the jiggling sailboats at anchor. He cannot get over the magnitude of her crime, the twelve stabs: “You counted them?” “They did,” says she. She runs off and dances on a pier beside the jade green water: “Are you going or staying? Do you want to see me to night?” She almost touches his face. He reaches out and almost touches hers, but playfully, like a cat, she runs off. Slowly, thoughtfully, he follows, as only John Malkovich does. “You remind me of … somebody,” she teases. He wants to know whom. “I’m not sure yet,” she answers, in a riddling and slightly pretentious voice.
During
At prodigious length they make love—“the body never lies” (Feeney)—twisting and coiling and groping for something in one another that no one