[In the following review of Beyond the Clouds, Lane offers a melancholy tribute to Antonioni’s films, and to art films in general.]

In the fog of an Italian town, a handsome young man falls in love with a beautiful young woman. He tries to kiss her. When this fails, he tells her, “I’m a drainagepump technician.” Amazingly, this approach, too, is unsuccessful. They spend the night in the same hotel, but in separate rooms. She undresses and waits for him, in vain. In the morning, she is gone. A voice informs us, “They never met again.” Two years later, they meet again. By chance, they attend the same movie. Afterward, she brings him up to date. “I’ve been wondering recently why I have such a need to hear words,” she says. He feels differently. “I’m enslaved by your silence,” he says. At last they go to bed, where his desire is so perfect that he cannot possibly spoil it by actually making love. He leaves. Whether they ever meet again is unclear. Only one thing is certain: we have been watching a Michelangelo Antonioni film.

Beyond the Clouds, which plays at the New York Film Festival on September 28th and 29th, could well be Antonioni’s final work. I hope that I’m wrong about this, but the man is turning eighty-four next week, and is not in the best of health, and the movie feels like a summation of his abiding concerns. More than a distillation, certainly: it’s a long haul, not exactly rambling but taking its time to stroll through a number of separate plots, as if touring the soundstages of a favorite studio, and pausing every so often to enjoy the sights, most of which consist of women’s legs. There are four stories in all, beginning with the drainage pumper (Kim Rossi-Stuart) and his beloved (Inès Sastre). The scene then switches from Ferrara to Portofino, where a movie director (John Malkovich) spies a woman (Sophie Marceau) in a shopwindow. When they finally meet, and even before they retire for the statutory coupling, she announces that she murdered her father. The third and most complicated section—the only one, at any rate, in which cause and effect, rather than dream logic, have a say in human conduct—takes place in Paris, where Roberto (Peter Weller) has a lengthy affair with Olga (Chiara Caselli), to the chagrin of his wife, Patrizia (Fanny Ardant). When Patrizia eventually walks out, she goes to rent an apartment and finds it occupied by a man (Jean Reno) who looks as beached and betrayed as herself. Guess what happens next. Finally, we get a joke—a playlet that depends on its punch line. Niccolo (Vincent Perez) follows yet another beautiful woman (Irène Jacob) to church, where he falls asleep. When he awakes, she is gone. He runs after her, sweet-talks her, and asks to see her the next day. Whereupon she turns at the door of her apartment and fires off the last word in put-downs: “Tomorrow I enter a convent.” And she goes inside, without even bothering to stop and have sex. Extraordinary behavior.

Beyond the Clouds is not a misogynist picture, but Antonioni is so thoroughly conditioned by the habits of an Italian lifetime to revere women, and so keen to ascribe a grail-like fascination to their bodies and souls, that it might be easier for all concerned if he did dislike them. The entire film, in fact, is riddled with the shortcomings that have made irreverent moviegoers snort at Antonioni for so long: his own sense of humor, for one thing, lying withered and unused in the corner, not to mention his sententiousness, and the infuriating ease with which he foists his characters into a kind of spiritual gridlock before—or, to be precise, instead of—making any attempt to introduce them. Such loftiness, which was already sky-high when Antonioni made L’avventura and La notte, thirty years ago, has hardly succumbed to the gravity of the years; Beyond the Clouds is still, as you might guess from its title, way up there. On what ground, then, might one dare to argue that this is, despite everything, a pretty wonderful movie, and that you should find a ticket while you can?

Well, there is the small matter of loveliness. After a summer of movies whose directors could quite feasibly have been swapped around without either raising or lowering the quality of their respective pictures, there is an intense autumnal relief in coming upon a filmmaker who could never be mistaken for anyone else. Antonioni’s movies beg for parody, but the true parodic instinct is by definition born of homage—it’s a half-respectful reply to a style that demands attention. Antonioni brings his own spaces and silences; he shrouds the earth in his own weather—close to the lyrical gloom of Marcel Carné, but with an extra pearlgray veiling, which, far from clinching lovers together, tends to keep them errant and apart. I recall Woody Allen’s expressing admiration for the fog scene in Identification of a Woman and a corresponding desire to re-create it for one of his own productions; Woody’s eyes should mist over at the sight of the new movie, which appears to deliver its dramatis personae from a netherworld of haze and rain. They could, you sense, be sucked back into it at any time; it’s as if every relationship on view here were distantly modelled on that of Orpheus and Eurydice, its urgency matched only by the undying threat of transience. The one trustworthy status is that of solitude—you can break out of it, launch brief raids into the lives of others, and then retreat to lick your wounds. Nothing in Beyond the Clouds is more uncluttered, or more evocative, than a shot of John Malkovich at the beach: he sits perfectly still on a swing, while the sand at his feet, whipped by the coastal wind, eddies and breaks like waves.

So much sadness seems to rise and radiate from this scene that, as often happens with Antonioni, you’re amazed that he feels the need to enlarge upon it in the surrounding dialogue. Reading back through my notes on the movie, I was battered by the memory of bad lines: “Have you noticed nobody watches sunsets anymore?”; “I think that to be happy we should eliminate our thoughts”; “We always want to live in someone else’s imagination.” In the unlikely event that any of these remarks turned out to be true, they would still be marked by an indelible dramatic gaucheness; it’s almost touching to think that an effortless visual maturity can coexist with such adolescent tristesse. Malkovich gets the worst of the deal; in the role of the movie director—Antonioni’s representative on earth, so to speak—he is not only caught up in the Portofino chunk of the plot but charged with the Virgilian task of guiding us through the other parts. The film begins with his cinematic musings on an airplane, and he keeps popping up, as if to reassure us, just in case we’ve forgotten, that it is a film. Well, I never. At the end, when Irène Jacob slips into her apartment, leaving her admirer on the stairs, Malkovich is there on the street where she lives.

There is an odd naïveté to this pattern of appearances; Antonioni nudges us to theorize about his work—he condemns us to become film critics, you might say, instead of proper viewers—even though the landscapes of Beyond the Clouds, both human and geographical, can and should be left to speak passionately for themselves. No one has found such fired-up anger in Fanny Ardant before, or such creepy brooding in the skullish features of Peter Weller; nobody—not even Kieślowski—has looked so carefully at Irène Jacob and realized that her natural expression is a kind of pun, at once flirtatious and sweetly devotional. When he gets down to sex itself, of course, Antonioni is in his element; the closeups of limbs and breasts have a certain chill to them—if we are honest about lovemaking, he suggests, does it really comprise more than the suave or fumbling rearrangement of body parts?—and yet the sheer intentness of the erotic scenes shows people at their most desperate to come alive. I used to balk at the Antonioni movies of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, at the insistence—the moral bigotry—with which alienation was urged upon us as the only available option. The director was serious in his purposes, but that very sincerity acquired a frill of chic; what is most moving about Beyond the Clouds is that, far from growing crusty or irascible in his old age, Antonioni has relaxed. The film is rife with images of discord and disquiet, but, possessed of a grace that I haven’t seen in his work since the elegant early days of Story of a Love Affair, it has the good manners to offer its unhappiness less as a precondition than as a suggestion: take it or leave it.

There are two reasons you should go and see Beyond the Clouds at the festival. First, it has so far failed to find a distributor here, thus joining such distinguished recent company as Leos Carax’s “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf” and Emir Kusturica’s “Underground.” Second—and this is hardly a separate reason—it feels like one of the last of its breed. Beyond the Clouds is many things, some of them more successful than others, but I take it to be, above all, an elegy for the art movie. I never quite thrilled to the battle that was pitched between mainstream and art cinema, but if low-level warfare has simmered for the last fifty years it has now been comprehensively won by Hollywood. The dedication to European cinema has, within a generation, sunk from a robust moviegoing habit to a buffs’ charter. That is why there is such relief, and a breeze of nostalgia, in watching Beyond the Clouds. It even contains a brief, inconsequential skit that serves no purpose other than to provide cameos for Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni—king and queen of the art house. I know perfectly well that there is something absurd in such crumbling Continental melancholy, in the concoction of ravishing women and reflex and virtually thoughtless philosophizing. But this weakness for profundity nevertheless signals, in retrospect, a certain strength of character—an eagerness to get something across, or at least to wrap us in a hypnotizing mood. I don’t happen to believe that Antonioni’s work is profound, but the illusion of profundity is so spooky, and so exquisitely managed, that it will do just as well. “There’s a cure for everything,” Jean Reno tells Fanny Ardant. “That’s what concerns me,” she replies. The world of Michelangelo Antonioni throngs with sick souls, and we may be slightly sick of them by now, but I wouldn’t want them to get better.