[In the following review, Hogue praises Beyond the Clouds for its unity and “combination of present-tense immediacy and timeless detachment.”]

Beyond the Clouds is the work of a great director. It is one of the major films of the decade. But as of this writing, it has no announced American distribution. That this is a late work of the man who made L’avventura,Red Desert, Blow-Up, The Passenger, and many more is enough by itself to make the film worthy of serious and widespread interest, but it more than stands on its own as an example of inspired contemporary film art. Indeed, Michelangelo Antonioni’s accomplishments seem all the greater when we consider that he has brought this film off in the middle of his ninth decade and despite the disabilities from a stroke suffered in the 1980s.

Produced in collaboration with Wim Wenders, the film consists of four episodes, all based on stories in Antonioni’s book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director, and directed by Antonioni himself, with linking sequences (including a prologue and an epilogue) shot by Wenders. This episodic structure and the piecemeal nature of the filming might seem to augur a somewhat scattered film, a loose-structured anthology, say, or even a mere set of footnotes by an octogenarian filmmaker who has not been in the forefront of international cinema since The Passenger in the mid-Seventies, and has been more or less inactive since Identification of a Woman in 1982. But Beyond the Clouds is in fact a brilliantly unified work in which the various episodes and digressions develop in complex, and at times oblique, concert with one another. The film is distinctively of a piece with Antonioni’s very best work, and yet it also charts new directions and fresh developments.

For simplicity’s sake, one might say that Beyond the Clouds consists of four unusual love stories linked by the musings and reflections of a filmmaker wandering in search of material for his next film. This filmmaker character, known as the Director and played by John Malkovich, makes remarks and pronouncements drawn from the writings and interviews of Antonioni himself, and also appears as a major character in the second episode. The episodes themselves have distinctive swings: first the story of an unconsummated love affair, set in Ferrara, Antonioni’s birthplace in Italy; second, a flirtation in Portofino between the Director and a shopgirl who claims to have murdered her father; third, the story of a Parisian marriage torn apart by the husband’s errant amorousness; and fourth, a young man’s flirtation with a young woman devoted to her religion, in Aix-en-Provence.

Each of these is, in a sense, a story of an “impossible love,” and each concerns itself with a couple that is, to one degree or another, “on the make.” But the episodes connect up with one another in ways that are subtle and varied, and more attached to style and detail than to any obvious narrative resemblances. This deceptively casual network of interconnections includes a number of familiar Antonioni themes and concerns: alienation and isolation, deflected passion and blocked emotions, existential ambiguities amid modern prosperity, spiritual uncertainties and romantic failure, the complex interplay of character and setting. But the episodes are also linked by some concerns—religion, youthful sexuality, the male gaze—that are relatively new and fresh in the director's canon.

In all four episodes, drama and narrative are set in motion when a character makes a bold pass at someone he or she has just seen for the first time. This impulsive eroticism emerges in a variety of contexts, and the results and consequences vary a good deal, too. Youthful sexuality plays a worriment role throughout, and female nudity is a conspicuous element in each of the first three episodes. but not at all in the fourth, which concerns itself with pursuit of a young woman whose serene chastity gradually takes shape as her strongest quality. The interruption and/or frustration of sexual desire is a recurring element as well—except perhaps in the third episode, in which comparatively abundant fulfillment becomes inextricably intertwined with frustration of an especially paradoxical sort. Alongside this erotic element, the episodes also display an ongoing fascination with serious conversation. The first and fourth episodes give us flirtations that also seem to take the form of spontaneous, fragmented philosophical dialogues, and the second makes a powerful fetish out of rash, unabashed confession. The seduction of the husband in the third episode takes place by way of a young woman’s provocative application of an anecdote about travellers who stopped on their speedy journey to wait for their souls to catch up with them. And the husband’s relationships, with both his mistress and his wife, turn on the power of his sudden declarations to each of them—his words are winning with both women, but the net result is that he can succeed finally with neither of them.

The Director speaks of the lovers in the Ferrara episode as emblems of the “quiet folly” of their city, but that episode takes its most evident shape as an exquisitely mysterious love story. Silvano (Kim Rossi-Stuart), a travelling technician, and Carmen (Ines Sastre), a young schoolteacher, meet by chance in a hotel and are almost instantly immersed in a strong, mutual attraction. Both evidently intend to spend their first night together, but each waits for the other to make the first move and they end up falling asleep in their separate rooms. That first attraction is intense enough for the two of them that they quickly resume their passion when they meet by chance again, some three years later. This second chance brings them into more intimate contact as well as into bed together, but again the lovemaking is never completed. Despite their frankness about their passions, which appear genuine and wellnigh overwhelming, both characters hesitate at crucial moments in their growing intimacy; and the ultimate hesitation—with the two naked lovers caressing each other on a bed in the afternoon—is the most inexplicable one. Both characters are bold and articulate, but their attraction is largely unspoken and intuitive, and whatever produces their hesitations and parting goes unexplained. Thus, this Ferrara episode assumes dual guises—fable on human contradictoriness and tribute to the mysteries in sexuality. The centerpiece of it all is the nude scene, in which Silvano covers Carmen with phantom caresses—lovingly exploring the contours of her body, but rarely if every actually touching her.

The Ferrara episode has a dancelike quality, rather like a combination of tango and hesitation waltz, with the lovers throwing themselves into a choreography of advance and retreat—patterns that recur in the subsequent episodes. The second, in Portofino, echoes the advance-and-retreat motif, but with the would-be lovers being at once far less talkative and much bolder than the pair in Ferrara. Much of the Portofino episode is a battle of gazes, male and female. The Director character glimpses a young woman (Sophie Marceau) walking by and follows her down the street to the harborside shop where she works. He enters and moves about, but he has plainly come only to look at the young woman, and she in turn is quite conscious of his gaze even before he enters. She shies away at first, but reasserts herself with stares of her own. Eventually, the Director leaves the shop without having spoken to her. On another day she sees him at an outdoor cafe and approaches to announce, “Whatever you have in mind, it’s better if I tell you who I am. I killed my father—I stabbed him twelve times.” The Director is understandably taken aback by this, but soon he is walking with her and inquiring about the nature of the killing (for which she was acquitted). She wonders what he’s doing that evening, and—after a false start or two—they go to her apartment. Their brief love scene there seems a darker variation on the final stages of the Ferrara episode.

The Portofino episode is the briefest and least discursive of the film’s main stories, but it gains considerable substance from the presence of the Director, who speaks elsewhere in the film of his devotion to images and his wandering pursuit of subject matter, situations, and settings for each new film. In this episode, artistic activity becomes at least partly interchangeable with sexual adventure, a theme that is retrospectively implicit throughout the film’s gathering of these “tales of a director.” And the amour fou that briefly animates this unlikely relationship between filmmaker and patricide serves to remind us of a gentler brand of mad love in the first episode.

The Paris episode is the most complicated and convoluted of the film’s segments. Most of its characters are older than those in the other episodes’ couplings, and it is (rather ironically, as it turns out) the episode with the most in the way of fulfilled flirtations and lovemaking—ironic because the patterns of advance-and-retreat and abrupt farewells make themselves felt here, too.

This episode starts by showing us the beginning of a love affair between a married man (Peter Weller) and a young woman (Chiara Caselli) who approaches him in a cafe, then skips ahead three years to show us the man and his wife (Fanny Ardant) quarreling over his continued failure to end the affair with the woman from the cafe. The husband’s promise to make an immediate break leads to passionate lovemaking, but when he visits the younger woman to say farewell, the ensuing quarrel leads to a similar result—furious lovemaking. After this, the Paris episode introduces another married man (Jean Reno), who returns home to find that his wife has left him and taken much of the furniture with her. He takes a phone call from the departed wife, who tells him not come looking for her, and then gets a visit from the unhappy wife of the previous scenes, who has come to rent the apartment and has arranged for her furniture to be arriving not far behind. They recognize that they have a “perilous circumstance” in common, but while he is optimistic that “there’s a cure for everything,” she seems to have gloomy reservations even as she tentatively accepts his embrace. She, after all, is the one who has insisted that “love is ridiculous” earlier on.

The Aix-en-Provence episode returns to flirtation and young love via another chance encounter on the street, but the woman in this case is religious in ways that become increasingly significant as the sequence proceeds. The young woman (Irene Jacob) is on her way to Mass, and she consistently resists the attentions of the young man (Vincent Perez), but she is enough engaged in the developing conversation that she avoids turning him fully away for a while. Secure in her faith, she is wary of the worldly pleasures—talk, thoughts, the body—which the film elsewhere seems to celebrate, but her intellect, wit, and plain beauty appear to make a claim on the loquacious young man just the same. Both seem drawn to each other through conversation, and it is only when she finally declares that she’s about to enter a convent that the young man and we ourselves in the audience can see that the sexual potential in this brief relationship will never be realized. The young woman’s chastity ensures that this episode’s couple is unique among those in the film, and yet there is a sense in which these two are distinct variations on the unfulfilled couples in the other segments. Indeed, versions of her serenity and his aggressive interest can be traced to one figure in each of the other pairs in the film—with gender links applying in most but not all instances. The religiosity of the Aix episode has no parallel in Antonioni’s previous films, but it reverberates in details of the Ferrara episode and in the more metaphysical elements of the director’s ruminations in the linking sequences.

The Director’s voiceover passages in the linking sequences are too rich in philosophical overtones to fully register in the course of viewing the film. But they set a lofty tone of thought and emotion that gives the film a larger kind of coherence while also reasserting an aura of existential mystery. The voiceovers provide a sense of his skepticism about humans’ ability to change with the modern world (“I fear that we remain irreparably ourselves, as we were when we began to live”) and a haunting sense of his vocation (“I am someone profoundly attached to images. I only discovered reality when I began photographing it …”). The Director’s devotion to the act of seeing with all of its attendant difficulties is beautifully embodied by the suave, fluid mise-en-scene throughout Beyond the Clouds—which provides the strongest of its powerful links to Antonioni’s masterpieces. And the voiceovers ultimately establish a sense of the Director’s image-quest as something both mystical and quixotic: “We know that beneath the image that is recorded lies another, more faithful to reality, and beneath that one lies another, until we come to the final image of that absolute mysterious reality which no one will ever see.”

Taken by themselves, the episodes can sound rather slight, but their cumulative effect is richer and more extensive than any plot summary can indicate. Antonioni’s characteristic oblique narrative methods are put to fresh use in this anthology” setting, and the interplay of episodes is enhanced by a small array of miniature episodes that echo and mirror the main ones: a brief flirtation and battle of gazes in an elevator in the Paris episode, for example, and an older couple (Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau) turning up briefly to banter about images in Cezanne country during the prelude to the final episode. The complex relationship of image and word—another recurring element of Antonioni’s work in general—makes regular contributions to this process in Beyond the Clouds as well. The characters’ dialogue is frequently articulate and precise, but just as frequently the film makes us aware of quiet and subtle disparities between the seen and the said.

The phrase “beyond the clouds” comes from That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, but not from any of the adapted stories. It appears in the volume’s opening story “The Event Horizon,” which concerns an aviation accident. One of the officials who investigates the crash speaks with the press at the accident scene and finds himself describing the wreckage in coldly precise terms while his gaze drifts away from his listeners and on toward the distant horizon—“at the clouds” and, finally, “Beyond the clouds.” Looking “beyond the clouds” is a mode of protective irony, a way of being inside a difficult situation and outside it at the same time, and as such, it is an image that can speak to the essentials in Antonioni’s whole approach to filmmaking. After all, his best work—Beyond the Clouds included—is distinguished by extraordinary combinations of present-tense immediacy and timeless detachment. And it is this uniquely cinematic way of seeing that makes Beyond the Clouds into a consistently intense experience with exceptional moment-to-moment richness throughout.