30% off through December 23 ⭐️ SHOP OUR GIFT GUIDE
One Scene

At the End of Love’s Road with Michelangelo Antonioni

By Eskil Vogt

Features—

Jun 22, 2022

At the End of Love’s Road with Michelangelo Antonioni
Share

Over the past two decades, the Norwegian filmmaker Eskil Vogt has developed a style that combines complex psychological drama and melancholy romanticism with a punk sensibility. In his work, he often favors a nonlinear narrative style that reveals the subjective experience of his characters through montage and set pieces. Vogt has brought this approach to the movies he has cowritten with Joachim Trier—including the Oscar-nominated The Worst Person in the World—as well as the two features he has directed himself; his latest, the occult thriller The Innocents, premiered at Cannes in 2021. Though his films contain a wide range of genre elements and influences, their abiding preoccupation is the ennui of modern life and the existential pain of romantic love—themes that connect him with one of his heroes, the Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni.

When I asked Vogt to discuss a favorite scene from a film in our collection, it came as no surprise that he chose a moment from Antonioni’s 1962 L’eclisse, a portrait of a doomed affair, starring Monica Vitti. In this article, edited together from our conversation, Vogt talks about the subtle precision of the film and the art of crafting a relatable breakup scene. —Hillary Weston



Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse is about the end of one love affair and the beginning of another. It’s also about how hard it is to believe in relationships and create meaning out of them. This is the Antonioni film that hits me the hardest—in spite of the fact that I can’t describe the intricacies of the plot in detail. It has maybe my favorite opening and ending in any movie, but apart from that I couldn’t tell you what happens. It’s not that the scenes are forgettable; rather, they’re incidental. L’eclisse is not as contained a movie as La notte or L’avventura, which have more identifiable arcs. But it’s such amazing filmmaking.

I first saw L’eclisse in the nineties on a VHS I’d ordered from a British company. I was probably still in my late teens, but I knew I wanted to make movies. Of course you should see the film in a cinema if you can, but because Antonioni is so frame-obsessed, watching his films on a small screen often allows you to become even more aware of his compositions. Seeing that for the first time, especially as a wannabe filmmaker, you’re knocked out by it, and you really become conscious about cinema in a new way. It’s very inspiring, because it makes you feel that cinema can be that poetic and that stylized and still be very much about important things.

One of the genius elements of the opening scene is the use of sound, beginning with the titles. Straight away you have this pop music that gives a sense of youth and fun, and then right when composer Giovanni Fusco’s credit appears, the music changes abruptly to an aggressive, modern score. That music continues until the scene starts and you enter into silence. Antonioni uses very little music in the movie, but when it’s there, it’s very expressive and commanding.

He does with sound what he does with other aesthetic elements—he makes very clear choices and wants to show them off. It’s not invisible moviemaking. And this emptiness of sound says so much about what must have happened right before the moment we’re dropped into. This couple—Monica Vitti’s Vittoria and Francisco Rabal’s Riccardo—must have had a fun night out. Maybe they went dancing and were feeling in love, but when they got home, it turned into a night of quarreling. They probably said some hurtful things.

We’re hearing the silence that comes after a night of breaking up. That’s such a beautiful place to begin. And in this oppressive silence, Vittoria picks up an empty picture frame on the table and moves an ashtray out of the way so that the composition within it will be more perfect. It’s like Antonioni is making a joke about his own aesthetic. He’s so unabashedly present in his filmmaking, and in a moment like this, you’re reminded that someone is behind the camera making decisions, and that objects can be as important as people. Throughout the scene there’s a fan blowing, which not only serves as a good sound device but also creates small movements within the frame that make the composition pop and add to the feeling that these characters have an interior life. When the fan passes the two characters, you get some slight motion in their clothes and in their hair, and that results in a feeling of tension.

This scene has been a key reference for me whenever I think about how to choose which parts of the action to show. People always give the screenwriting and editing advice to “get in late and get out early,” which I think is very lazy. It usually means to get to the action quickly and get out before it dies down. Antonioni is someone who often gets in very, very late and then stays there. He’ll start a scene after everything dramatic has already happened. In this film, you don’t see the conventional moments of quarreling between the couple, or scenes full of romantic passion. If you’d been in the room earlier, you would have heard a lot of arguing about this or that—but in the aftermath we see, the feeling is more universal. Many of us have been in that kind of breakup moment when you have no words left to say, because you realize you cannot negotiate love. Antonioni transports you into that feeling, and the scene becomes even more psychological and relatable. It’s not just about that couple; it’s about every couple.

Then there are these shots of Vittoria’s legs as she walks around the room that seem to be from Riccardo’s perspective. You feel that he’s looking at this beautiful woman he loves, and maybe this is the last time he’ll be able to look at her in this way. Her steps are heavy, giving us the feeling that she’s been in those heels too long. This echoes the idea that they’ve been up all night and are still in their evening clothes. It’s wonderful how the scene then progresses with her opening the curtains to reveal the daylight outside, suggesting they’ve been at it a long time.

Buy Now

From a screenwriting perspective, one of the most meaningful moments happens when Vittoria takes the espresso cups off the table and puts them in the kitchen. She’s in Riccardo’s house, she’s the one breaking up with him, and still she does this automatically. In that moment you understand she’s probably spent a lot of time there, and this is her role in the relationship. This also shows how, when you have a bit of a bad conscience, you often want to do something like that to escape the moment. People often talk about how Antonioni is more concerned with aesthetics than character, but I find him to be a very psychological director.

When Joachim and I were writing The Worst Person in the World, we were thinking a lot about how to make a breakup scene realistic. And though I don’t think we discussed this scene, we wanted to capture the same back-and-forth nature of that kind of conversation. You don’t just say, “I don’t want to be with you,” and then walk out the door. People are ambivalent, and it’s hard to be sure of what you feel.

Later in L’eclisse, when Vittoria forms a new relationship with a character played by Alain Delon, she says, “I wish I loved you more or not at all.” It’s hard to be in that in-between space, but we navigate that all the time. Usually when you make a movie about a romantic relationship, you want to make it about the most important one in that character’s life. But Antonioni doesn’t do that—he shows you one relationship in a series of others, and he does so in order to depict how difficult it is to relate to and reach another person, and how difficult it is to be sure of your own emotions.

RELATED ARTICLE
L’eclisse: A Vigilance of Desire
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

More: Features

Starring Ida Lupino
Starring Ida Lupino

Before she won acclaim as a pioneering director, the Hollywood icon made her name as a powerfully vivid actor who brought grit and toughness to films by such masters as Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Michael Curtiz.

By Farran Smith Nehme

On Film / Features — Dec 4, 2024
Out of the Blue’s Teenage Wasteland
Out of the Blue’s Teenage Wasteland

Dennis Hopper’s bleakly nihilistic drama struggled to find an audience after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, but time has revealed it to be one of the most hardcore films about disaffected youth ever made.

By Rebecca Bengal

On Film / Features — Nov 21, 2024
The Psychosocial Dread at the Heart of Japanese Horror
The Psychosocial Dread at the Heart of Japanese Horror

From Kaneto Shindo to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the masters of the genre over the past half-century have tapped into a deep well of cultural anxiety, exploring everything from the sins of their nation’s feudal past to the dangers of new technologies.

By Michael Atkinson

On Film / Features — Oct 29, 2024
Lionel Rogosin, Between Empathy and Outrage
Lionel Rogosin, Between Empathy and Outrage

The director of such classic political docudramas as On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa defied the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking with his innovative approach to collaboration and performance.

By Tanya Goldman

On Film / Features — Oct 24, 2024

You have no items in your shopping cart

View Cart Check Out
Close Menu

Search

For streaming, search the  Criterion Channel