Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

in all the wrong ways: wicked servants taught it to children; wicked older boys taught it to innocent younger ones; girls and boys in school taught it to each other away from adult supervision. Sex was naturally done with someone; solitary sex was not. And third, unlike other appetites, the urge to masturbate could be neither sated nor moderated. Done alone, driven only by the mind’s own creations, it was a primal, irremediable, and seductively, even addictively, easy transgression. Every man, woman, and child suddenly seemed to have access to the boundless excess of gratification that had once been the privilege of Roman emperors.

      Masturbation thus became the vice of individuation for a world in which the old ramparts against desire had crumbled; it pointed to an abyss of solipsism, anomie, and socially meaningless freedom that seemed to belie the ideal of moral autonomy. It was the vice born of an age that valued desire, pleasure, and privacy but was fundamentally worried about how, or if, society could mobilize them. It is the sexuality of the modern self. (210)

      And the feminism—by which Sarris must mean the presence of women—is hardly rampant, the lesbianism indeed virtually enshrouded. At any rate, Sarris’s comment is a beautiful example of the denigration of Niccolò. And the descriptions of Seymour Chatman give an equally pointed elevation to the principal females. “Mavi, a trendsetter, tends to represent the attitudes of an entire generation,” writes he, “She has a restless need to experiment” (219, 220). As her masseur—in one scene, after she accuses him of needing her rather than loving her, he offers an extended pudendal friction through her underwear—“Niccolò … is very much the servant of Mavi’s imperious sexual needs. And her ‘right’ to so elaborate a sexual life seems guaranteed in some sense by her membership in the leisured class” (226). Some, following D. H. Lawrence, would postulate that the poor experience an authentic, vigorous, bawdy sexuality while the etiolated rich are too self-conscious even for the depths of pleasure. Ida, for her part, “is fresh, frank, and, though young, level-headed and warm” (215); “healthy, down-to-earth, direct, sincere, in every way estimable, indeed to a fault: one cannot imagine why Niccolò would want to give her up” (227). Perhaps Niccolò does not want to give her up; mercifully, this issue doesn’t get explored. Vincent Canby waved the film off as “excruciatingly empty,” but could not forbear from finding Mavi an “enigmatic young woman … who makes love with a furious abandon that is about the only thing in the film that works.”

      Niccolò does give Ida up, however, it being a repeated truth that he looks for a creature he has not found. That fact is central to the film’s structure. He gives up Mavi, too, once it becomes clear to him she does not wish to be found, will not permit it. In the end, he has given everyone up.

      The way Sam Rohdie sees the film, the camera “is always with Niccolò … beside him as it were, looking as he looks, encountering as he encounters, like him facing the exact same problems of identification, of sorting out reality from its simulacrum, desire from the other” (188). Here is presented once again, this time in the context of an Antonioni work, one of those delicious Baudrillardian gauntlets, the crippling challenge of the simulacral world; and one of those piquant Lacanian projections, too, the problem of knowing the beloved apart from love itself, seeing the line between one’s conceits and the objective strangeness that confounds them. These are interesting riddles, but they do not describe Niccolò in this film as much, perhaps, as the viewer who is obsessed with them. The camera surely is beside Niccolò throughout, and we see the world as he sees it, a place without sharp discriminations. There is a tasteful, but also dulling harmony to colors and forms, as though everything has been managed into shape and all objects contrived to join one another in neat arrangements (the bed is always where Niccolò would like it to be, or better, where he expects it to be, because he is past finding sexuality an act worth appreciating). His friends, his family, his lovers, his business contacts, strangers he has never met before: with all of these he maintains a calm and even disinterested tone, quite as though they have been subjected to a ray that equalizes their statuses in his regard.

      As to that regard: it moves lethargically, like the monster from the black lagoon, yet also methodically, so that he can maintain clarity without interruption as he searches in all directions for a central feature, a sacred object upon which to fasten the fascination. Daily life is a chain of obstacles, weeds entangled around him as he strokes his way forward: the ineffable, unretrievable beeper that will disarm his apartment’s warning system; his sister’s complaints about her troubles at work; his little nephew’s innocent but also incessant demands for additions to his stamp collection; the inexorably stringent demand of Mavi’s secret lover—demand or provocation; Ida’s very fluidity, her ability to do everything, to sense everywhere, to love without hesitation. At a certain point “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” the world can become a locus of events, sensations, and encounters that are all—that are each—precisely and only matters of fact. Its romantic patina worn away, its charming gleam dissipated by a movement of the light, the wine glass is merely a vesicle, its contents merely a calculated distillation from grapes that endured a particular winter upon a particular slope. What had seemed sacred and mysterious, overwhelming, even irritable—the genitalia of the lover—become anatomical parts in an array; just as, with a subtle change of light, the mundane becomes evanescent. As Camus wrote, “What wells up in me is not the hope of better days but a serene and primitive indifference to everything and to myself” (39). Sitting in his window in the finale, Niccolò is bathed in an ethereal, holy light—light from the sun; yet at the same time he is merely illuminated, with more illumination than some objects (like the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, upon whom, says cinematographer William Daniels in Visions of Light [1992], a few extra foot candles were expended to make them “pop”) and less than others. He exists on a kind of scalpel blade between perfunctoriness and salvation, corruption and purity, the everyday and the unworldly. Because each term implies the other, every special instant invoking and requiring the mundane, it is also true that neither term is true. Neither mundanity nor sanctity survive outside the arbitrary judgments through which we mandate and create them. In the end, what confronts us is light.

      All things are connectable. Niccolò searches for his woman not as the center of his narrative but as the starting point from which he can join together the various threads that bind all things to all things. In that apartment building where Mavi has been hiding away with her girlfriend—her cool, even supercilious girlfriend; her brutish girlfriend (because it is this girlfriend who has hired the thug)—there appear to be a number of discreet apartments, but actually all of these spaces exist together, simultaneously, and each footstep taken by any person in any one of them echoes or contradicts a footstep taken above or below. Moral stricture, ethical suasion, aesthetic form, political mandate, economic imperative: all of these, at once, are ways of formulating and predicting the sorts of events that Niccolò is moving toward and away from, observing carefully, thinking through as possible additions to the story he wishes to make. When one has adopted a certain state of readiness, every discernable nuance is potentially raw material. It is not so much that Niccolò is apathetic, that he does not feel his relations with Mavi and Ida, as that he is obsessively devoted to the work at hand. He is continually, and inextinguishably, burning with the motive to narrate.

      And what is this story, this supreme construction? That a few dozen red chrysanthemums are delivered by hand. That one drives off into the night to escape from Rome. That a collaborator wonders about what kind of love story can be written in a corrupt world. That the swimmers move through a pool, while a strange girl watches them in self-absorption. That outside one’s window, in a pine tree, there is a birds’ nest, but no birds. The human presence, a ghost of sorts, inhabits this world and circulates among objects, caressing them with its intent. As Ida and Niccolò leave his apartment, they pass the concierge’s cubby and see half the chrysanthemums scattered on the floor: some ghost dropped them, the red flowers, perhaps it is me.

      BORED

      We no longer know how to see the real faces of those around us.

      —Camus, “The Desert”

      One difficulty that has beset viewers of this film, and confounded critics—“When it hit New York in 1982,” moans John Powers, “this elusive, challenging work received the kind of dismissive reviews more appropriate to Claude Lelouch than to one of the century’s great