Antonioni’s adventures with Monica

Michelangelo Antonioni once spoke of freddezza morale – ‘moral coldness’ – as the defining theme of one of his early films, Chronicle of a Love (1950), though the phrase is apt to mislead if it suggests melodramatic wickedness or even ordinary selfishness. The condition is subtler than that: a gradual cooling of the emotional faculties, scarcely perceptible at first, by which prosperity begins almost imperceptibly to outrun its purpose, and sexual desire multiplies while emotional attachment falls into abeyance. Contemporary Marxist critics swiftly enthroned Antonioni as the great anatomist of alienation.

The British Film Institute’s Monica Vitti season is a timely reminder that Antonioni’s great diagnoses of modernity found its supreme embodiment not so much in an abstraction as in an actress. Their affair quickly became one of cinema’s great romantic and creative partnerships. Beginning with L’Avventura and reaching its fullest flowering in L’Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964) – with a teasing cameo from Vitti in La Notte (1961) – each enlarged the other’s imagination.

Vitti could convey freddezza morale without ever reducing it to frigidity. Her gift was to make anguished reticence shimmer with suppressed feeling. Vogue captured something of her singular allure in a 1966 profile, dwelling on her ‘amber eyes’ and ‘artfully disarranged hair’, though the lexicon of fashion proved unequal to the altogether stranger magnetism of her presence. There was an icy coquetry about her, a glacial sensuality that seemed to promise intimacy only to retreat into uncertainty, while her expressive face could communicate reams of unspoken thought without the encumbrance of dialogue. Few actresses have possessed such enigmatic authority.

In L’Avventura, Vitti is introduced almost as an afterthought. Anna (Lea Massari) and her fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) appear to be the protagonists, while Vitti’s Claudia hovers at the edge of the frame, lingering on quaysides and glancing upwards from the street as lovers disappear behind drawn curtains. Then Anna vanishes during an excursion to the volcanic island of Lisca Bianca and Antonioni’s eye returns to Claudia with increasing insistence.

Thereafter, one gradually realises that the film has subtly shifted its centre of gravity. Claudia joins Sandro in searching for her missing friend, accompanying him from one rumoured sighting to another, from deserted railway stations to teeming Sicilian towns. For an hour or so, we are in Hitchcock territory. Antonioni rehearses all the trappings of the detective story. Bloodhounds comb the craggy rocks of Lisca Bianca, suspected smugglers are interrogated and newspaper tip-offs are followed from Milazzo, where trains arrive and depart, to Noto, where a loose knot of idle men gathers behind Claudia, momentarily separated from Sandro; Mike White recreated the latter scene shot for shot in The White Lotus. Each fresh lead promises the revelation that never comes.

Somewhere along the way, however, the search loses its urgency. Antonioni withdraws the premise upon which the entire enterprise appeared to rest. Anna’s name is spoken less frequently. Claudia and Sandro find themselves drawn together almost against their better judgement. Antonioni makes little of the moral drift. The investigation desultorily continues, if only out of habit, until it becomes apparent that the true mystery concerns neither crime nor punishment but the extraordinary ease with which people accommodate themselves to absence. It was this that the French critic Pascal Bonitzer later christened ‘the disappearance of the disappearance of Anna’.

By the close of the film, Sandro has betrayed Claudia as casually as he once did Anna, succumbing to the charms of Gloria Perkins (Dorothy de Poliolo), a 19-year-old writer who claims to compose in trances under Tolstoy’s guidance. Vitti later discovers him on a stone bench beneath Mount Etna, weeping with self-pity. She hesitates before laying one hand on the back of his head. It is among the great set-pieces in film history. Vitti channels, by turns, forgiveness and pity, exhaustion and impatience, and, above all, it seems to me, the knowledge that nothing will really change; Antonioni cuts away before the gesture can give way to a plausibly conclusive interpretation. It remains among the few endings in cinema (Michael Haneke’s superb Caché is another) that grows in ambiguity with reflection.

Audiences at Cannes in 1960 disingenuously greeted L’Avventura with boos and catcalls. A prolonged love scene on a hill provoked guffawing. Vitti’s walks through hotel corridors were treated as redundant delays. The final shot, held after any conventional Hollywood film would have faded out, was drowned by jeers. What offended, no doubt, was the slowness. The greater offence, though, was that Antonioni had refused to uphold the time-honoured compact between storyteller and audience, whereby every mystery is resolved. In its place, he offered the possibility that cinema could think by omission.

Like many of his filmmaking compatriots of the 1950s, Antonioni cut his teeth on Italian neorealism. But by 1960, he had begun to outgrow its assumptions. It was no longer enough to follow the fate of the stolen bicycle, as Vittorio De Sica had in Bicycle Thieves. The real drama lay instead in the invisible alterations taking place within the person’s head who had lost it. From the late 1950s onward, outward events retreat in Antonioni’s films as feeling and hesitation, boredom and desire – the very themes Alberto Moravia and Giorgio de Chirico were contemporaneously exploring – take centre stage. The old certainties of plot survive only as scaffolding for a subtler exploration of interiority.

Antonioni’s politics were likewise indirect. A product of the Italian Left who had grown impatient with programmes and manifestos, he turned away from the working class towards the beneficiaries of il boom, the new postwar bourgeoisie. The choice was far from fashionable in leftist circles. He wanted, as he later remarked, to examine the victorious class because victory had made its maladies visible. His characters inhabit a world of mid-century Roman apartments, grand hotels and chauffeur-driven Lancias. But abundance, Antonioni seems to suggest, solved remarkably little for this set. The greater their freedom of movement, the more emotionally vacuous his characters become. Wealth has relieved them of necessity without supplying them with purpose.

Against this world, Monica Vitti remains something of an enigma, alluring and unpossessable. Watching her great turn in L’Avventura, one recalls Marx’s observation that under capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into air’. In Antonioni’s world, all that is reassuringly premodern – fidelity, friendship, family – melts into a haze of alienation. The blazing Sicilian summer proves to be the perfect setting for a study of the moral coldness of modernity.