[In the following review, Pizzichini links Beyond the Clouds thematically, narratively, and stylistically to Antonioni’s earlier films.]

It is fourteen years since Michelangelo Antonioni’s last film, Identification of a Woman; now, at the age of eighty-four, he has completed Beyond the Clouds, a kind of final reckoning, in which the veteran director, though wheelchair-bound and unable to speak since his stroke in 1985, addresses the chilling ennui of his earlier work—and moves beyond it. Based on autobiographical pieces (published as Quel bowling sul Tevere in 1983), the film’s four stories recall unsuccessful relationships. As a concession to the film’s backers, Beyond the Clouds has been made with Wim Wenders’s assistance. His contribution is a series of linking episodes that feature John Malkovich as a nameless film director who, camera in hand, travels across Europe in search of characters. In effect, he plays Antonioni, trawling through his memories in order to furnish a film.

Beyond the Clouds opens with Malkovich above Ferrara, Antonioni’s birthplace, in an aeroplane. It is the “folly of the city,” he tells us, that a love affair that lasts for years, without ever existing, should take place there. Under a mistswathed colonnade, Silvano (Kim Rossi Stewart) falls in love with Carmen (Ines Sastré) at first sight. Nothing comes of their encounter until years later, when they meet again. They declare their love, but as Silvano’s trembling hand hovers over Carmen’s naked body, he realizes that the consummation of his desire will bring disappointment, and leaves. The choice of location—Ferrara is famous for its constant shower of fine rain—lends a suitably vaporous feel to the narrative.

Malkovich’s voice-over elaborates on Antonioni’s more opaque handling, but when the ghostly director steps into the action, it is only to confirm his ineffectuality in the real world. Like Thomas, the photographer in Blow-Up (1966), he goes in search of images, but finds a murder. In cold, dank, out-of-season Portofino, Malkovich is smitten by a beautiful shop assistant (Sophie Marceau), who responds to his looks of entreaty by confessing to patricide—“I killed my father … stabbed him twelve times.” Because he reminds her of her father, they make love, but the camera is more interested in her than in Malkovich—its putative master—so the director moves on.

In L’avventura (1960), near-riots erupt on the streets of Messina when a prostitute splits the seams of her skirts; a frenzy of voyeurism momentarily shakes the townspeople out of their inertia. This search for distraction is taken up again in the third segment of Beyond the Clouds, in which the inhabitants of austere Parisian apartments drift in and out of relationships. “We must wait for our souls to catch up with us,” Olga (Chiara Caselli) tells Robert (Peter Weller). Instead, they embark on an affair. Meanwhile, another couple splits up, and Robert’s wife (Fanny Ardant) turns to the husband (Jean Reno) for consolation. She strokes his cheek, but her look of weariness betrays the gesture’s futility. In the last story, we see a woman (Irene Jacob) at prayer, through the eyes of Vincent Perez. He admires her fervour and chases her along narrowing streets; on the threshold of her door, he asks if he can see her the next day. She smiles: “Tomorrow, I enter a convent.”

Although these stories are slight, they possess an internal logic that makes Wenders’s linking framework unnecessary. He acknowledges his superfluousness, however, in a wry coda, which recalls Antonioni’s 1961 film La notte, by featuring its stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. Moreau mocks “Il Maestro,” as Mastroianni painstakingly recomposes a Cézanne landscape, inserting factories in a feeble attempt to update it. Antonioni’s vision, Wenders suggests, needs no renovation or faddish enhancement, either. The sense of isolation that has always suffused his work is made more poignant, here, by the severity of his own illness; the women remain inaccessible, the men—mimicking his paralysis—immobilized in the face of desire. But Antonioni also reveals an unprecedented compassion for his characters’ loneliness and, for the first time, celebrates some of the unusual pleasures of abstinence. In their belated re-enactment, his unfulfilled longings achieve something akin to fulfilment.