Memento Mori

Eclipse. A mess of burnt-out butts. A young man (Francisco Rabal) and a young woman (Monica Vitti) sit looking at them, at what is left of their relationship. ''I tried to make you happy," he says hopelessly, and hopelessly she replies: "You did not succeed." Why not? What was missing in their lives? What do people need in order to be happy? In this gloomy little masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni does not try to answer such questions. He simply shows how one young woman tried to answer them--and failed. He tells the story of a luteless Orpheus and a promiscuous Eurydice who don't even know they're in hell.

When the young woman leaves her lover she wanders uneasily through the instant suburbs of Rome, through the temporary town that is rapidly burying the Eternal City, through the symbols of a dead past and a lifeless present. In despair she retreats into fantasies of flight from a world where money talks so loud that the heart cannot be heard. She greasepaints her body and makes like a Mau Mau; she goes for a plane ride and imagines she's a bird. But the paint washes off and the wings of fancy moult. The world is still there. She decides to make terms with it. But in gaining the world, will she lose her own soul?

One day at the stock exchange, in the temple of commercial civilization, she meets a handsome young broker (Alain Delon) with a mind like a ledger and a ticker for a heart, a man to whom all values are convertible in gold. He changes women the way he changes ties, and one day she happens to match his socks. "When I'm with you," she muses after the fact, "I feel as if I'm in a foreign country. But perhaps there's no need to know each other in order to love. Perhaps there's no need to love . . ."

No need to love? The camera wonders as it wanders through the city. Change and decay, Antonioni seems to say, in all around I see. A nurse wheels a baby carriage down a street. An old man watches it with haunted eyes. Headlines threaten atomic destruction. Water leaks from a barrel, runs into a sewer and is seen no more. In a park a fountain suddenly fails. The day fails. In the darkness a single street lamp burns, far away and cold. Then suddenly the lamp burns in the center of the screen, immense and pulsing, urgent, the light of life, the only life a human being has and will ever have. It goes off. The End.

The sequence is masterful. With a few stark strokes Antonioni puts a diffuse and apparently senseless picture in a frame, in a black border of mortality that instantly reveals its perspective and its significance as a spiritual admonition, a memento mori. What's more, the frame reveals the picture as an extraordinary effort of style, as a definitive treatment of the themes Antonioni developed in L'Avventura and La Notte. As in those films, he employs the method of tedium to explain the nature of tedium, but he employs it so skillfully now that boredom is seldom boring. Vitti, as always, is endlessly fascinating, a luminous mannequin clothed with Antonioni's projections. And Delon is appropriately repulsive as a young man in a hurry. In the scenes at the stock exchange, Antonioni finds his brokers, as Auden found them, "roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse," and he simply throws his camera to the wolves. In one scene they yap and snap and snarl and slaver into the spectator's face for five, ten, fifteen minutes of financial frenzy.

Antonioni's style is beyond argument; his substance is not. No doubt he has reasons for his pessimism: millions of people now alive have lost their souls and will never find them; Eros in this era is all too often not a god but a disease; "the world today is ruled by money, and this leads to a dangerous passivity toward problems of the spirit." But sometimes Antonioni's pessimism seems almost as sick as the sickness he deplores, and certainly it is naive. The love of money is not, St. Paul to the contrary, the root of evil; and evil is not the dominant quality of modern life. Evil there is, but even in evil there is hope. As Mephistopheles admits in Goethe's Faust: ''I am the spirit that ever denies. That ever Evil wills and ever Good accomplishes."

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