L'Eclisse

Saw L'Eclisse, an Italian film about a woman fresh out of a long-term relationship. She is a secretary who was dating her employer so she is also out of a job. In a limbo between relationships and jobs, she wanders about, meeting friends and being dwarfed by giant futurist buildings that are going up near her apartment. Her isolation is artfully evoked by eerie impersonal statues and the buildings. She eventually begins seeing her mother's foxily attractive stock broker who spends his days in a frantic dash around the trading floor, fleecing fat men at the stock exchange and bellowing "Pronto! Pronto!" into telephones. Unsure if she really wants a relationship with him, she floats around, leading him on slightly but perhaps only teasing him.

The film is shot is a very oblique manner. The woman's isolation is mainly shown by setting (of all weird things.) Just before things get physical with the stock-broker, she opens a window and there's an ominous shot of tiny men dotted around a giant courtyard, a pair of nuns walking through its centre. Clearly she's thinking about sex but feeling unsure about it, but we infer this only from the vista outside of a window. The various opulent apartments which serve as default sets are covered with art pieces whose meaning is themed but obscure (for example, her old boyfriend has only abstract art on the walls. As soon as she dumps him, she puts a newly-bought fossilized flower on her shelf. Something's up here, but I don't know what.)

The film ends with another ominous and meaningful montage whose meaning I don't entirely grasp. There's a shot of water running out of a barrel into the street and down a drain which suggests squandered opportunity, but the water is washing away dirt as well, suggesting a cleansing, rather than wasteful, event. Perhaps the montage is only meant to be evocative and ambiguous. The film is rather to obscure for me. The surface-level plot of the romance is not interesting enough to keep my attention, but the poetic imagery and composition suggests hidden depths and flatters the viewer when the viewer is clever enough to crack pieces of the code. An interesting movie overall, but I think I wasn't ready for it yet.