I find this movie really quite bad, but at the same time interesting. Its worth a watch if this is the type of thing your interested in.

Essentially this film is a Wenders film masquerading as an Antonioni film, and while I have the highest respect for Antonioni, I really don't have any interest in seeing any more Wenders films than I already have.

Antonioni was ostensibly the director of the film, the only issue being that he was rendered mute from a stroke, so Wenders had to do all the real directing for him. It is to be assumed that Antonioni signed off on the film at the end, but Wenders has supposedly said that "Antonioni blinked, and I knew what it meant."

As a film about film the movie is really quite interesting (despite being poorly done), the essential plot is that a director (played by Malkovich) walks through cities, letting things happen to him, and letting his mind get carried away with stories built off these moments. I think the film really tries to be what film should be, a series of captured moments that have a sort of surreal beauty. The displacement in time, the physical body, the illusory sense of touch, most of all the disconnectedness of events. Film as a medium brings you things out of time, that capture your imagination, that stay with you as a quasi-fictional memory. The film expresses Antonioni's attempts to use film to grab on to the fleeting feeling of living, to deal with all the minor details of being alive. Which is touching coming from a stroke victim.

Unfortunately the film was directed by Wim Wenders.

Buy Beyond the Clouds

I am fairly certain that L'eclisse is my favorite film. While I would like to describe the film in depth in an effort to convince people to watch it, any description of the plot would not describe what impresses this film upon my life so much.

For one, there really is no plot. She breaks up with a man, meets a new one, but she doesn't love either of them. That's the entire plot summed up. The real content of the film, is in a certain passion that can be seen in the main character, who cannot love the men in her life. If you just read the film as a discourse on the lonliness of modern life, isolation and all the usual tripe that film critics say, then you are really missing the point of the movie. She tells the man at one point"I wish I either loved you a lot more, or didn't love you at all," but their relationship had aspects more important then anything that could simply be termed as "love."

One can most clearly see this in the last scene. They are laying on a couch together (Monica Vitti always wears beautiful skirts), and and when she gets up to leave they start making fun of all the lovers they had seen on the beach that day. The last joke she makes is about the way they first kissed (with a window pane between them)... they laugh, and touch each other. The scene is of one of those beautiful moments in relationships where two people feel okay being silly around each other. The giddiness a person feel around someone else, when they are not sure why they are giddy, but they know that touching the other person makes them feel that way. The absurdity of how much they want to kiss another person. That their physical body draws you in certain mysterious ways.

That moment is caught forever on film. You can see that she's drawn to him, though she would never be able to connect to him any other way then physically. In the context of the film the physical is all that matters, people are what they do, not what they say. A man is a stock broker, but the the way he deals with his losses describes more deeply who he is. She doesn't love Alain Delon, but she feels drawn to him. She doesn't care for the idea of him, but his physical self haunts her mind.

This is what makes the end of the film probably one of the most important moment in the history of cinematic style. The collection of disconnected shots has been interpreted to signify the lovers possible meeting points (empty, because they will no longer meet), but this interpretation forgets the shots of buses, of people's faces, of lights turning on, of buildings - The collection of object images that make up this shot sequence. The end of the film merely shows you things that exist. Things that are beautiful because they exist. Things that exist for a short while, giving some sort of worth to the world. Things that exist, but will eventually pass away. Like the love affair of two people who don't really love each other.

Buy L'eclisse