COMING TO CONCLUSIONS
by Don Larsson

"I can come to no conclusions."

The professor, a Miltonist of some note, was reading his own work in a faculty poetry reading.

"I can come to no conclusions."

The refrain came again, inconclusively. "I can come to no conclusions." The poem was inspired, the professor told us, by having recently seen Antonioni's Red Desert.

I had seen the film too, and the professor's refrain struck home. Red Desert, a visual poem about surfaces and colors, about industrial and emotional waste lands, had left me feeling drained, adrift, removed from things around me. The professor had caught the mood.

In Antonioni's latest (and possibly last) film, BEYOND THE CLOUDS, John Malkovich plays a movie director, a surrogate for the old man himself. "I've always wanted to know what lies behind the surfaces of things," says Malkovich in voiceover, taking a line from the director's memoirs, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. Walking and riding through and between four cities in Italy and France, Malkovich gazes at arcades and beaches, doors and streets, plazas and shop windows, connecting four stories about connection and disconnection, about conclusions and inconclusiveness.

In fog-bound Ferrara, a young man and woman meet and almost, but never quite, have a love affair. In picturesque Portofino, out of season and half-deserted, the director himself is suddenly taken with - and takes - a young shopgirl with a past secret that belies her looks. In rainy Paris, a man is torn between his lover and his wife, who finally leaves him only to meet another man in the same condition. And finally, in Aix-en-Provence, a young man without any religion but the pleasure of the present is taken with a young woman whose religious sense admits no pleasure and no present.

There could be much to mock here. Antonioni has always been on the verge of pretentiousness (and more than often over, according to his harshest critics). There are scenes that seem like parodies of visual tropes from other films: deserted streets, sterile modern architecture, women framed by the columns they lean against. Malkovich's verbal musings read better than they sound, and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality, as if it strained for a unity among these tales that is not quite there. (The Malkovich sequences were actually directed by Wim Wenders, called in to finish up because of the demands on his Italian mentor, weakened by a stroke a few years ago.) Typical for Antonioni, it is a very limited world in which these characters move - the working class and non-intellectuals serve mostly as props in these tales of bourgeois dissociation. Even though each character seems to be from some other place than where the action occurs, there is little hint of cultural mixing, we see only a child or two and no old people aside from Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau (in much-too-brief scenes). And there has to be some disappointment when it seems that what lies beneath the surface of things is what goes on behind closed doors.

Even so, Beyond the Clouds is a film that leaves much to think about and much to admire. A love scene where the characters never touch is like a dance of flesh in which the warmth can almost be felt. The cheap but messy vitality of a mistress's apartment stands in contrast to the cold stark modernism of a married couple's apartment. The beauty of a cathedral choir offers sanctuary from the moisture and texture of a cobbled street. A deserted apartment becomes a semi-comic scene in what seems to be a round of eternal returns. And suddenly, we are aware that we are not watching a director moving between places and imagining a set of stories but moving through the actual landscape of his own interior world. Even at this stage of his life, Antonioni comes to no conclusions but suggests that the same stories will continue behind those silences, those surfaces.

CineScene 2000