You know when you desperately want to say something but you’re too wracked with anxiety to get it out, your mouth is filled with tongue, your throat aches, you feel a pressure in your chest and and a frantic energy in your frozen limbs, and the space around you weighs down, constricting you and seemingly engorged with its emptiness? Well, L’Eclisse does a damn fine job of capturing that feeling. In its opening scene, in which Monica Vitti ends her engagement, the characters barely talk, but the space around them won’t shut up. In one shot, the camera slowly arcs around the faces of the two former lovers; unlike a still shot or a pan, the shot insists on the three-dimensionality of the space around the faces, makes us aware of it all around them. Monica Vitti is adrift in space. Everything in the scene—frames-within-frames, reflections, objects leaping forth, others flattened, recessed, a blowing fan in the foreground, looming large in front of a tangible void, other objects in the vast distance far behind, Vitti lost in the divide—everything relentlessly reminds us of it, this space around her. The space is palpable, it separates, it weighs down, it cannot be overcome. In it, Vitti is the model of ennui, of aimless, unspoken miseries. Most everything in the movie is unspoken.
The characters go through their motions, they engage in ridiculous, empty amusements and activities: an embarrassing tribal dance in black face, the glorious frenzy of the stock market exchange. Should the fleeting love affair at the center of the story be included in that list? I don’t know. It’s a fine love affair as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far. At film’s end there’s a sequence lasting seven or eight minutes. In this sequence, the central characters are nowhere to be found. There’s nothing but space.
