The Undeniable Connection between Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni

Monica Vitti, proclaimed Queen of Italian Cinema by the Italian minister of culture, has died at the age of 90. The muse and second half of one of the most fruitful auteur/actor collaborations in the history of cinema with her then partner, the enigmatic Michelangelo Antonioni, Vitti is one of the most iconic figures to ever be immortalized by celluloid. The pair made four films during their romantic relationship, all masterpieces about alienation and the inability to communicate in the modern world. The extraordinary films: L’Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclipse, and Red Desert, made over only a 5 year period between 1960 and 1964, are the highlight of both filmmakers careers. Given Antonioni’s depiction of detached lovers it is extraordinary the relationship lasted as long as it did to produce these four essential gems.

In a dialogueless scene in L’Avventura Vitti is left alone on the streets and wanders aimlessly around. Suddenly it becomes clear to her, and to the audience, that she is the lone woman, surrounded by dozens of captivated men. The camera captures their hungry gazes and she moves amongst them, beautiful, chic, one of a kind, and, understandably, more and more uncomfortable because of her onlookers. If anything this scene foresaw the power Vitti would hold over the eyes of international audiences. While viewers see her with a much less purely sexual gaze, her performances are utterly thrilling, new and impossible to look away from. 

It was with L’Avventura in 1960 that Antonioni would first shake the film world to its core, with a film that stunned and befuddled audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. Elusive, beautifully shot, and existentialist, the film was a precursor for future directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Apichtapong Weerasethakul. Antonioni’s slow burning pace that favors a rich, complex visual atmosphere over traditional narrative perplexed viewers, leading to polarizing reactions that varied from awestruck admiration to infuriated animosity. Unprepared for something so new and daring, the film was booed and catcalled throughout its debut by the audience on its opening night, forcing Antonioni and Vitti to flee the cinema. Yet a select group of filmmakers and critics present at the screening saw something the majority of the audience did not and the film won some rave reviews and ended up winning the Jury Prize at the festival and went on to become an international success.

Whether the film leaves you hot or cold, it is impossible to watch it and not be convinced that Monica Vitti was destined to become a legend of European cinema. Her thick blond hair, stylish 60s haircut, and irresistibly cool polka dotted Italian wardrobe create what is one of the most recognizable cinematic looks in history. Her performance is the key to understanding the film, and she gives it not so much through dialogue as through her beautiful, expressive face and body language. She begins the film in what appears to be a supporting role, as the best friend character, Claudia, a girl with an open minded, unjudging, and friendly strut and aspect. As the film moves on we see torment, desperation, hope, devastation, and forgiveness play out nonverbally through her physical performance. Her enormous blonde hair, long thin nose, and attractive beguiling eyes, wide, far apart, and almost flattened and fish-like make her a more interesting and unique beauty than her contemporary, more textbook perfect, knockout female stars like Bridgette Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, and Catherine Deneuve. Vitti is the perfect match for Antonioni’s sexy, sophisticated, and angsty protagonists, and it is hard to imagine anther actresses standing in her stead.

L’Avventura has become infamous for its plot, or lack thereof, which does not so much feature an open ending as an open two thirds of a run time. In the first 30 minutes, Ana, the troubled woman who appears to be our protagonist, disappears on a small rocky island. We are led to believe, or perhaps our own film watching experiences have trained us to expect, that the rest of the film will be about the search for Ana. While in some ways it is about a search for Ana, it becomes clear that our protagonists become less and less interested in her as the film moves forward. 

Their quickly fading preoccupation for their friend and lover is essential to what Antonioni is trying to communicate. Each of the Antonioni-Vitti films concern themselves with fractured human relations, or rather, the impossibility for two people to really, truy communicate. The most symbolic representation of this solitude is seen in the island scenes of L’Avventura as one of the characters laments the loneliness of islands saying, ‘I never understood islands. Surrounded by nothing but water, poor things.’ In fact, the islands are an obvious metaphor for the human characters who may be surrounded by a million distractions and other people, but who might as well be surrounded by water for all the boredom and self obsession that consume them. Vitti and the other characters scale the rocky island ground as the camera captures their searching, windblown faces in deep focus while small isolated islands in the background represent the searchers themselves. 

Ana’s fiance Sandro and Vitti as Claudia are shaken with fear at her disappearance. They go as far as to spend a cold, rainy night on the island alone in a shed with a fisherman and another member of their party in hopes of finding her as the rest of their friends go to alert the police. Yet less than 24 hours after her disappearance a sexual spark is lit between the two and Sandro makes advances towards Claudia. At first, racked with guilt, Claudia resists, but eventually she gives in. As their friends return with the police and nothing is uncovered they decide to continue with their journey, quite undisturbed by the mystery of Ana’s disappearance. While Sandro and Claudia give a bit more effort in their search than Ana’s so called friends, they soon begin an affair and by the end of the film Claudia even admits to fear that Ana will return. 

This begs the question, if even our relationships with close friends and lovers are forgotten with the passing of a few days, what really lasts? In the changing world of the 1960s and the boom of capitalism and luxury, mourning the loss of a close one was no longer in style and one quickly became entertained with new distractions and attractions, leaving what should be a harrowing emotional process to be quickly forgotten or repressed into the deep confines of memory. The idea that nothing lasts anymore is present in other aspects of the film such as when Sandro explains new architecture. While Italy’s glorious past is present in the centuries old stone structures that have withstood generations of war and time, the new buildings erected are neither aesthetically pleasant, nor made to last more than a few decades. In another scene on the island, when looking for Ana they instead find an ancient piece of pottery. Our rich aristocrats bemusedly admire it and imagine taking it home when one of them accidentally drops it. As a response he offers nothing more than a shrug of his soldiers. While the vase endured the salt, waves, and storms of the sea, it could not survive the touch of our modern, clumsy, uninterested human hands. 

Antonioni’s films are about Italy’s upper class, and are an unjudgemental critique of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Seen today his films are even more significant. As our attention spans lapse, dating apps offer an seemingly unlimited number of matches, and COVID itself has made us more isolated and connected to nonhuman objects and technology than ever, it seems that our chances of making real connections have even lessened.

The main contradiction that plagues Antonioni’s protagonist lovers is both a need for the presence of a lover and a need to be alone. This very human contradiction can lead to the demise of many relationships as people fail to find the balance of being with and away from someone they love. Many sections of his films are silent shots of people looking at each other, then looking away, then looking at objects. One sees hope and disappointment appear and vanish from their faces again and again as they hope their feelings will be somehow telepathically received by their romantic counterpart. In another brilliant scene of L’Avventura, Vitti scales the stairs of a church with Sandro. One of these near wordless scenes of exchanges of looks is progressing as the two look at and away from each other before Vitti stumbles into the church bells. Surprised, she is then suddenly exhilarated by the response of bells from another church from afar. A response! This is exactly what each of the characters is looking for in their own relationships, a response when they expose themselves and their feelings and desires through words, or a simple glance in the direction of a longtime or possible new lover.

Antonioni’s follow up to his controversial smash hit was La Notte. Here Vitti only appears more than half way through in a supporting role, but her performance is just as commanding and essential as that of her European powerhouse costars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. Mastroianni plays an up and coming intellectual writer and Moreau plays his upper class wife. The two are disenchanted with their relationship, and much of the film follows Moreau’s gaze as she longingly looks at Mastroianni and seeks for a way to reignite their relationship. Again and again she either gives up on her attempts or sees that they are useless, and instead escapes to wander alone, observing the ordinary and extraordinary things she comes in contact with first through the city streets and later at the party of a successful businessman she and her husband attend. Through Moreau we see a world of parallel and perpendicular lines, horizontal and vertical of windows, skyscrapers, scaffolding, and elevators that seem to want to box us and everything with us into an orderly society where we are all in our place. The flats have lost all sense of life. They are all identical boxes with small square windows. Even the lamp posts are neat and numbered. These scenes of people walking around and looking could be seen by many audiences to be boring, and certainly would be more so by default be colder and less colorful in similar films by auteurs from other countries. Yet the magic of Italy of the 1960s is that it was so cool and the Italians so animated, that even turned down to the most minimal levels of entertainment and narrative structure, Antonioni’s ‘boring’ films, which are clearly taking place in the same Italy as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, depict a world that is possibly flawed and soulless, but also fascinating and alive.

In La Notte Antonioni also takes on capitalism more directly as Mastroianni is offered a job by his new big shot friend to write a history of the company and sell his talents to the corporation in exchange for abandoning his own projects. At first possibly enticed by the offer, the cut directly after the conversation to a large elegant bird cage makes it clear what Antonioni thinks of it, and what would effectively happen if Mastroianni if accepted. 

At the party both husband and wife see Vitti as young, passionate, sexy, and full of the possibility that they once saw in themselves but in their middle age have lost. Vitti here is as attractive and alluring as ever with short cropped brunette hair and a sleak, black tank top dress. Moreau sets Mastroianni on her tracks and he finds her crouched in the ground pursuing a small object back and forth across the floor like a cat. The bored couple seem to look to Vitti either to bring about a new romantic beginning or at least a rupture to put an end to their own dull, empty relationship. Vitti correctly states when she bids the two good night that they have utterly exhausted her.

The final film in Antonioni’s so called trilogy of alienation pairs Vitti with another of the titans of 60s European cinema, the gorgeous French actor Alain Delon. Delon plays a young stock trader whose clients include Vitti’s mother. In one of the first shots of the two together we see them both at the edges of the frame, separated by an enormous stone pillar. Unsurprisingly, this foretells the fate our young lovers' romance is doomed to have. Later, the most impassioned kiss the two share is shared separated by a glass window. It seems that though the idea of physically connecting excites them, the reality does not live up to expectations. 

The scenes in the stock exchange are atypically noisy, busy, stressful, and full of action for an Antonioni film. Yet they fit perfectly in his critiques of materialism and capitalism in modern society as clients win and lose big and human relationships are belittled to insignificance next to the emotional highs and lows of the market. This is further represented in an off screen death which is quickly brushed aside even faster than Ana is forgotten in L’Avventura. Delon has his car robbed by a drunk who plunges it off a bridge and into a river. As Delon invites Vitti to come see the damage with him he almost annoyingly laughs off the death of the drunk as he calculates the damages to the car and makes plans to repaint it and sell it. There is no time nor interest in death no matter how tragic or close we are to it. The world demands that we continue buying and selling in order to move forward.

If you thought Antonioni avoided narrative before, in the ending L'Eclisse he parts with it altogether, far more than in any of his previous films. The two lovers, ecstatic, make plans to meet the next day. Yet soon after the lost looks on both their faces makes this meeting seem less probable. The camera then abandons our protagonists completely. Instead Antonioni brings us to places once inhabited by them, but only fills them with the sound of the soundtrack and the random passerby. We are given no indication as to when we are seeing these images, but it would seem that neither Vitti nor Delon decided to show up to their usual meeting spot. What we see instead are frames populated by vast open spaces and surreal, otherworldly shapes such as a pile of cement blocks, scaffolding, a sprinkler, and a barrel of water. These places have suddenly become almost apocalyptic. We see people waiting, presumably for the bus, yet some have strange looks on their faces. Another man reads a newspaper about the pending threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. This brings us back to another image of Moreau from La Notte gazing skyward as young men shoot rockets off into the sky in a park and the onlookers debate going to the moon. Our protagonists themselves seem to inhabit an unrecognizable world that is constantly changing with new architecture and renovations constantly reforming places they knew in the past. The last shot of the film is a closeup of a street light, as if it were itself the aftermath of an atomic explosion.

Antonioni made his last 60s Vitti project, and first ever color film in 1964. In Red Desert the director abandons the cool hip urban and natural spaces of Rome, Milan, and Sicily to set his film in industrial northern Italy. Though filmed in black and white, it is the greyest of all of them,i though it also makes very intentional use of color, as was also present in his contemporaries first color films such as Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Vitti first appears in a striking emerald green coat, and the reds, greens, and blues that stick out from the gray make for a colorful world that is arresting not in its beauty, but in its ugliness as these colors stand out from the grayness of their surroundings. Constantly foggy, smoky, and dreary, the film once again is obsessed with lines, but this time the lines of the tubing of machines and boats that crosses here and there to flush out materials or smoke from one place to another. The factories are like a paradise for the line obsessed Antonioni whose camera chases their trajectory from one side of a space to another. 

In Red Desert Vitti’s European acting counterpart is the English actor Richard Harris, appropriate here as he also made his name for appearing in films set in the working class neighborhoods of Northern England. Vitti herself plays the most damaged of all her characters as a housewife and mother who has been traumatized by a small car accident she had. She finds herself alone in the world, as all Antonioni’s characters do, but even more so, and she suffers another devastating blow when she finds that even her young son of 5 or 6 years old is willing to go to great lengths to lie to her when he does not get what he wants.

The film's final line of dialogue about little birds' ability to avoid the poisonous yellow smoke that the factory exhausts is a parable for Vitti’s own situation and that of all mankind’s in general. We know the world is capable of poisoning us, and it is up to us to avoid it, or fly directly into it. 

After their break up, Vitti and Antonioni would remain friends and even make one more film together in 1980, though it was not well received. Vitti would become one of the most successful comedic actresses in Italy and even worked once with Luis Buñuel in his masterpiece The Phantom of Liberty,, and Antonioni went on to make art house films in the English language like the classic Blow Up, the psychedelic Zabriskie Point, and the Jack Nicholson starring The Passenger. While both successful in their own right, for my money, neither were able to make works of art as powerful as their 1960s collaborations. Perhaps making real personal connections is impossible in the modern world, and even more impossible now, but at least for 5 years, Antonioni and Vitti made a very real, very special connection, the proof of which clearly seen in their 4 films that have perplexed and intrigued audiences since their debuts, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future and beyond. It is possible that nothing lasts, but as long as the art of cinema does, so too will Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti.