Monica Vitti, who died on February 2nd this year at the age of 90, is to Michelangelo Antonioni as Liv Ullman was to Ingmar Bergman in being the ultimate muse to interpret the director’s feelings in their movies. Antonioni’s works were always about the visual, never about the complete plot of the story (I wrote about his career previously, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Stories Have No Ending, if you want to check it out.). He was such a unique director with his own brand of filmmaking that Antonioni needed somebody to be his symbol of existentialism in a post-war world. Somehow, through Monica Vitti, he was able to display his ambiguous feelings on the political, social, and economic standards of the time.
Going against her fellow contemporaries such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Claudia Cardinale, Vitti would emerge as one of the leading ladies of Italian cinema in the 1960s. Her career was just beginning when she met Antonioni, a newcomer in film directing, while doing stage work in Milan and then was cast in the internationally polarizing L’Avventura. Vitti plays a woman going on vacation with her lover and another couple on a yacht when suddenly a friend goes missing. As they try to find her, it is Vitti who starts to lose interest in finding her friend and instead shows interest in the missing woman’s lover. It was an international sensation for better or for worse – the crowd at Cannes jeered throughout the screening – but for the critics and filmmakers who loved it, it put Antonioni and Vitti on the map.
These feelings for their work were transferred over in L’eclisse in which Vitti plays a woman who ends her engagement with one man and begins to pursue another relationship with a stockbroker, played by Alain Delon. Vitti is the expression of discontent with materialism and money making, a reflection of Italy’s economic boom after the war. Yet, the irony is not lost on who she is pursuing as she cannot escape her desire for something different, exploring the interchangeability a person has when the feelings are just right. This time, the reaction at Cannes was more positive and, after the success of Antonioni’s previous film La Notte, avant-garde’s newest master was cinema’s most daring storyteller.
The last major collaboration with Antonioni was his first color film Red Desert, in which she co-starred with Richard Harris as the wife of an industrialist who remains emotionally disturbed following a car accident. Technology looks beautiful and is a sign of progress, but in Antonioni’s world, people still have the inability to adapt to new concepts and causes unevenness to our psychological side. Vitti is away from the city and isolated by the largeness of these factories and the surrounding landscape that are bright, maybe too bright. Thus, her neurosis is confirmed when she has no pleasure in making love to her husband and later remarks, “We are all separate.”
Vitti’s performances were based on expression and movement rather than dialogue, almost a throw back to the silent film days. She moves in sync with Antonioni’s pacing and silence, from hope to despair, place to place. Love is a commodity that is always there but she never feels content with it. Her beauty is convincing, as a man would fall for her, but instead of physical love, Antonioni, who was in a relationship with Vitti, was more interested in the psychological. His existentialism is drawn out through her, interpreting the auteur’s cold and distant films into something emotionally relatable. Post-Antonioni, Vitti would explore more roles, even in comedies, continuing to rack up acclaim and rarely stepping out of Italian productions.
Vitti once remarked, “I am three dangerous things: a woman, an actress, and not married, so I suppose I’ll work until I’m 90.” While she retired in the early 1990s, Vitti remained one of her generation’s most versatile performers in Europe, a symbol of a celebrated era in cinema. Even after she dropped out of the spotlight due to her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, Vitti was still considered forever immortal.
Follow me on Twitter: @brian_cine (Cine-A-Man)
