Two Early Films by Italian Masters

The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

The Children Are Watching Us, made in 1942 but not released until two years later, is a superior tearjerker that, being told largely from a child's point of view, anticipates Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thieves. The child is a boy about five years old, Pricò. His family is middle class: The father works as an accountant, they live in a modern apartment block in Rome with a live-in housekeeper, and the mother is secretly having a love affair. The movie opens with his mother taking Pricò to the park to watch a puppet show, after which she sends him off to play while she meets her lover, who is trying to pressure her into running away with him. Unknown to her, however, Pricò is watching from a distance, and although he doesn't really understand what is happening, he knows instinctively that it is something which threatens the security of his comfortable life.

This sequence sets the tone of the rest of the movie. As Pricò observes from a distance, we see nearly everything that happens from his point of view. When his mother abandons the family for her lover, we see his sadness and confusion, and we share his sense of being lost as he is passed from one relative to another, each one less sympathetic and caring toward him than the last. We also sense his joy when, after he becomes seriously ill, his mother returns. But even though she resolves to break off her relationship with her lover, he is so persistent that she eventually finds herself torn between him and her child.

De Sica's attitude toward the behavior of the adults in Pricò's life—his father, the housekeeper Agnese, the mother, and her lover—is quite objective. He makes us understand the complexity of their relationships, how the feelings and desires of each conflict with those of the others and also the incredible difficulty of the decisions they must make. He guides the actors who play these parts to restrained performances that convey only too clearly their quiet inner turmoil over their choices. (His attitude toward the other adults in the movie is much less tolerant, their negative qualities exaggerated almost to the point of satire.) Yet in the end they are always guided by their own emotions even though they are aware of the unfortunate effects their choices will have on others. Sadly, it is Pricò, who has no say in their actions, who always ends up suffering the most.

A seaside holiday intended to be a celebration of his parents' reconciliation provides some terrific set pieces including a magic show at the hotel where they are staying, encounters with a group of decidedly odd fellow vacationers, and a very touching episode absolutely typical of early de Sica in which Pricò runs away and tries to get back to his father, who has already returned to Rome, after he sees his mother furtively meeting her lover in a scene that mirrors the one in the park at the beginning of the movie. In many ways The Children Are Watching Us is quite similar to the later Umberto D., only here the lonely, misunderstood, and helpless main character is a small boy rather than an old man. The boy who plays Pricò, Luciano de Ambrosis, who was not even five years old when the film was made, is marvelous at expressing the sensitivity and sadness of his character, and his ability to cry on cue amazing. To call his performance moving would be a tremendous understatement. Heartbreaking would be more like it.

At the end, Pricò is confronted with his own difficult decision, one which he makes with greater maturity and less selfishness than the adults in the the film. Perhaps all that silent watchfulness taught him more than the unobservant adults ever suspected.


Story of a Love Affair (1950)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

I couldn't help thinking of the recent Tilda Swinton movie I Am Love while I watched this film. Both involve the wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist, trapped in a loveless marriage to a rather cold older man, who has an affair with a poor but younger, more sexual, and more vital man. But I Am Love, which consciously evoked Antonioni, couldn't stop drooling over the very goodies it seemed to be condemning as emblems of shallow materialism and even provided the heroine with a hopeful future with an earthy stud, an attempt to coat a simple story of adultery with a slick and oppressively elaborate veneer that for me gave the movie a distinct air of artifice. In contrast, Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair, his first fiction film after working for several years as a screenwriter and director of documentaries, seems completely genuine.

Compared to Antonioni's spare later films, Story of a Love Affair is positively packed with plot. Parts of it resemble film noir, while other parts are closer to romantic melodrama. In Milan, a wealthy businessman hires a firm of private detectives to investigate the past of his beautiful young wife, Paola (Lucia Bosé), whom he married without knowing anything about her and who has never revealed anything about her life before their marriage. He also suspects she is having an affair, so he wants her followed. Through the investigating detective, we learn that Paola's best friend was killed in a freak accident—a fall down an elevator shaft—just days before she was to be married and that Paola hastily moved to Milan right afterward.

We also learn that the dead friend's fiancé, Guido (Massimo Girotti), has recently shown up in Milan and that he is indeed having an affair with Paola. Further, it seems that the two were in love before and that even though they did not actually kill the friend, they were passively responsible in allowing the accident to happen. The feelings of guilt over her complicity in her friend's death drove Paola to flee to Milan and find refuge in an impetuous and loveless marriage to a wealthy older man. Now that Guido has returned to her life, she wants to be with him, but she doesn't want to give up the material comforts she has grown used to. So she hatches a plot with Guido to murder her husband so that she can have both her lover and her husband's money.

This may sound like the typical film noir material of movies like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, but Antonioni puts his own stamp on the story, finding and developing elements that would become fundamental to his later work. He hasn't yet arrived at his fully evolved mature style, but the beginnings of it are unmistakable. I think of Antonioni as one of the most visual of all filmmakers, and you can see that tendency already at play here. In Story of a Love Affair are many examples both of his lingering static shots with their formalistic compositions and also of his fascination with architecture and the urban landscape, traits that were to become hallmarks of his films. Also in evidence is Antonioni's characteristic unwillingness to fragment the interaction of his characters into edited sequences, his preference being to follow them with the camera in precisely choreographed long takes—especially in confined interiors—a technique modern filmmakers might do well to study as an alternative to the overuse of the hand-held camera.

Most striking of all, though, is the gradual introduction into what starts as a genre film of themes that would later become preoccupations. The world Antonioni depicts in Story of a Love Affair is one in which people are eager to forget both their collective and their own personal pasts. Yet willingly cut off from the past, they seem adrift in the present, unable to move forward, only to spin around and around in endless circles without ever getting anywhere. Antonioni uses conventional noir tropes to explore his fascination with the twin vortices of the post-World War Two human condition: the alienation of his characters from their lives and the enervation that at the same time prevents them from doing anything to change their lives. And running as an undercurrent through the entire film is a sense of personal isolation that results from the profound inability of these people to connect. At times it's hard to believe this film was made sixty years ago, so fresh does it seem in its attitudes.

L'Eclisse (1962)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.