I, Qassandra

Congratulations to me for having being seen my first Monica Vitti movie… Almost 2 decades after Gabriel Moked used to speak about those incomprehensible films of Michelangelo Antonioni, in which Monica Vitti always sat on a sofa, a misunderstanding that was very badly received by his second wife Daniela Shemi and I think also by his first one, Ofra Shunit (they were friends)… probably it all got mixed up in my head, like in the movie… 20 years… go figure… Anyway, this is not my Antonioni debut. The first one was Blowup (1966), but it was an English speaking movie taking place in London, so maybe it doesn’t count. Nevertheless I do think Blowup is much more mature than this one, although François Truffaut would have probably taken it the other way around. Nevertheless 2, this is another Sight and Sound’s 10 Greatest Films Of All Time list entry. And it supposed to be existential. I recognize here the Albert Camus’s Don Juanism (as portrayed in The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) in the character of the fiancé of the missing young woman, that quickly moves on to her best friend and then to the luxury escort-girl in the hotel only to get back to the forgiving Claudia, i.e. Monica Vitti, i.e. the best friend. She isn’t the leading lady at the beginning of the film. Anna is. But then she disappeared. And life goes on. Only Claudia tries to fight the emptiness. For example, that of the rocky bare volcanic island Anna went missing on. She is repeatedly saying she needs things to be clear. Roger Ebert has argued that the disappearance of Anna is a metaphor for the void in which all the characters in the movie indulged and practically drown and disappeared in.[1] Seemingly indifferent and undisturbed, they continue with their hedonistic and empty lives as if nothing had happened. Even the arrival of the (supposed to be grieving or at least extremely worried) father of Anna is a kind of a spectacle, having been arriving on board of an over the top luxurious hydrofoil, and you really can’t decide whether its science fiction nature blends with the bleak exposed raw island or stands against it. At times one may feel something horrible is about to happened, an unnatural event maybe, be it in those otherworldly uninhabited islands, in the newly-built modern-looking deserted town stranger in style to the Italian Palermo decorative nature of the buildings elsewhere, it becomes ever stranger when we realize it reflects the cemetery seen from a distance, firstly mistaken by our wandering tortured couple for an adjacent town. And the inhabited, although sumptuous and lavish, always looks old and broken. The princess palazzo or the hotel at the end of the movie. The final scene in which Mount Athena looks over our heroes, also concludes that destiny is deceiving and mankind is small and helpless against the mighty landscape. This seemingly serene scene epitomized this evasive uncanny concept of gothic sublime.