Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969)

The squealed harmonica refrain that runs through Sergio Leone's masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, sounds like the unholy death moans of a desert reptile. Its minimal, haunting, even terrifying noise reflects much of the film's style, which is at once epic and stark, melodramatic and painfully, acutely real. The harmonica itself is something of an absurdity, the embodiment of psychological trauma of a bloodthirsty gunslinger out to avenge his family's deaths, yet it, like all the other transparently cinematic, borderline Brechtian elements, fits with odd plausibility.

Lured into making another Western by the Hollywood system despite hoping to retire from the genre, Sergio Leone got a fast one over on them by elevating the Spaghetti Western (which he'd already raised well above its usual level) into the realm of genuine art. Once Upon a Time in the West certainly wasn't the first (nor last) film to document the downfall of the West, but it ranks among the merciless and unsparing. Before this, revisionist Westerns carried some sense of elegy, of the loss of the spirit embodied in the other Westerns. Even The Wild Bunch, released the same year, has its own sense of regret, even if it is in the futility of it all. Leone's film, though not scathing or condemning, is a depiction of an evil system replaced by another evil system, though that might not even be sufficient: this is not a changeover between parties so much as an evolution of the old way.

I Am Love

I Am Love combines beautiful evocations from various media -- art, design, fashion, opera and especially food -- yet it never offers much lucid inspection of any one of them, and the whole is too messy to gel into a working film. It wants to be operatic, elegiac on the epic scale of Visconti's The Leopard. But that was a film that never let its passion dip below a rolling boil; Luca Guadagnino has made his film in a time wherein "melodrama" has become a four-letter word, so he attempts to cover his bases by trapping the swirling emotions this type of film should contain underneath the glacier of classical European art drama.

The opening shots underline this split, as the camera moves through images of post-industrial factories blanketed in snow with the ornate scrawl of the title card placed over the drab backdrops. These shots are graceful but unimpressive, and the occasional quick cuts that randomly shatter the mood without warning or meaning set a precedent for some sloppy editing here and there. The camera at last settles on a mansion, tracking with geometric precision until it moves inside to document the Recchi family, a group of people as outdated as the palatial home in which they live.

Servants clean dishes alongside Emma (Tilda Swinton), a Russian who married the Italian Tancredi and moved into this lavish villa to spend her days not doing much of anything. She, like her husband and children, always dress impeccably, even when they clearly have nothing planned that day and some only leave the house for minor errands. They could have fallen out of one of Bergman's more stately films, and the alignment of the family on the poster recalls similar blocking in Distant Voices, Still Lives, an attempt to capture the same sense of familial imprisonment.

But I Am Love only fleetingly conveys these feelings. One could attribute the more objective aesthetic to a reflection of Emma's own alienation from her emotions, but she does not appear to be unhappy in any way with her life. At a birthday dinner for the family patriarch, Edoardo, Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), she is as delighted as everyone else when the old man names his son, Tancredi, and grandson, Edoardo, Jr. (Flavio Parenti), as the new owners of the family textile factory. Everyone celebrates though they must have known ownership would pass down the family line, and Emma swells with pride. That textiles are a relic does not matter: this is a family business, and it has already provided enough generational wealth to make inevitably dwindling profits a concern for the middle-class person they no doubt hired to sort out financial affairs.

The only indication of something inside of Emma yearning for change comes when a chef who beat Edoardo, Jr. (also called Edo by most of the family), comes by to offer a cake as a conciliatory measure. Edo is delighted by the man's kindness and insists he come inside, but Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) politely declines, not wishing to intrude on the festivities. A passing Emma gets a look at him, though, and when Antonio quietly slips back out into the snow, a light comes on in an upstairs window, and Emma floats to the portal, peering outside of the curtain as if trapped in a Bröntean prison. Her old life did not constrain her previously, but a mere glance has put something into her mind, a faint pause where one did not previously exist. But is that dissatisfaction with the old way, or a sudden desire to try something fresher, more unknown?

I Am Love modestly scales down The Leopard's mournful commentary on changing times to a simpler look at the intoxicating allure of the new. The family itself has already survived the changing times that would have claimed anyone else: the factory still churns out fabric, still turns some kind of profit and the family enjoys aristocratic opulence. Only a mild comment from the younger son, Giancula, to his older brother about their grandfather exploiting forced Jewish labor during World War II hints at a darker past. By casting Ferzetti, star of Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, as the patriarch, Guadagnino recasts the modernity of that film as the old hat, the past he and others must now overcome to make their name when Antonioni is still praised even in death as the greatest of modern cinematic poets. It's a deft touch that opens up interpretations of the struggle of the Italian filmmaker to follow in the patriarch's footsteps or try to make a new way, an themes that are sadly unexplored.

For the rest of the movie is about Emma, played brilliantly by Swinton. Most filmmakers use her androgyny, that otherworldly aspect of her unconventional beauty. Because they allow for the more masculine attributes of her angular face, many often give her more traditionally "masculine" parts, and Swinton has shined in recent years with meaty, talky parts in which she controls much of the action. Her Oscar-winning turn in Michael Clayton threatened to overshadow the host of solid performances in the film, her conniving lawyer providing an icy, villainous logic to offset Tom Wilkinson's crumbling sanity and George Clooney's slowly seeping gallantry. I was so torn on Julia I've yet to review it, but her portrayal of the title character's fleeting ability to stay just ahead of her impending self-immolation fluctuated between dramatic intensity and a glorious flourish of overwrought melodrama in a way that made her irresistible even if the movie's mood swings and unnecessary length dragged the proceedings down.

But her role here recalls her extended cameo in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Also a socialite wife in Fincher's fairy tale ode to classic Hollywood. In that film, as this one, her life is comfortable and not particularly repressive, but the entrance of a force she cannot explain, a whisper of new, fresh life in the form of a man she does not particularly know. Emma comes across as an even more frigid and poised version of Elizabeth Abbot, the Russian winters of her youth having imbued her with a frosty countenance even at her most jovial and kind.

If nothing else, Guadagnino does us the service of presenting Swinton in purely feminine terms, never feeling the need to remind the audience that, just because she does not fit the narrowly defined guidelines of Hollywood attractiveness, Swinton must be considered weird (her weirdness is a whole other matter entirely). She looks even paler than usual from pancake makeup, a streak of red lipstick a tantalizing burst of color, as if all the blood in her face drained and pooled in her lips. After playing so many hard-edged characters lately, she displays an intense matronly warmth, treating her daughter's sexual identity with compassion and understanding and supporting her son's advancement within the company. But that look of longing in her eyes is piercing, when Antonio reciprocates she looks as if she might explode with pleasure in his presence.

Sadly, everything else borders on parody. Guadagnino's close-ups on art and food morph from a beautiful evocation to the most pretentious slide show in human history, a constant cutting between immaculately composed but lifeless shots that suck the air Swinton breathes into the film. Her lust is nakedly unlocked by a prawn dish Antonio prepares for her, a scene that unfolds with such unintentional hilarity that I half expected it to end with the punchline cutaway to a woman at another table saying, "I'll have what she's having." The other characters are rigidly divided along "old" and "new" lines, from Elisabetta's lesbianism and her pursuit of the arts representing more modern viewpoints and Edo, his named tied to the grandfather and patriarch, adheres to the more chauvinistic and greedy style of his father. Except when he doesn't. There's no consistency to these caricatures even though they are uniformly two-dimensional.

One cannot deny that Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is crisp and gorgeous, nor that Swinton isn't, as ever, at the top of her game. But it's all for naught. All of the beautiful shots of food and faces and art and nature lose their luster, and they drag on Swinton's lush and exotic performance. It's like seeing a Ferrari with a boat trailer attached to it, and just because the boat in question is a yacht doesn't make the setup any less lugubrious and absurd. The music of the excellent American composer John Adams is used throughout -- contrary to some reports, he composed no new music for the score -- but it does not fit. Guadagnino wants to make this an opera, but his use of Adams' actual operas clashes horrendously with the slowly paced, uneventful narrative.

Laughable juxtapositions abound, from Adams' ill-fitting score to some edits that would have gotten me thrown out of a theater for laughing so hard. When Emma discovers a note written by her daughter admitting to her lesbianism, the director cuts to shots of Milanese cathedrals surrounding Emma, the implications of old-school religious condemnation lazy and inarticulate, the equivalent of a rakishly raised eyebrow and a gentle nudge to the ribs. Having rewatched Black Narcissus the same day, I found Powell's cutaways to flowers, vibrant explosions of the passion that seeped out of every frame of that film, meaningful and evocative in a manner that Guadagnino aims for but does not reach. His close-ups on flowers during his distant and cold shots of sex (which still manage to get in some male gazes for all their stiffness) are desperate grabs for the same emotion, but all they amount to are sub-Georgia O'Keeffe evocations of a vagina.

Only at the last moments does the film finally play into the operatic tone it wanted to attain throughout. There are those who would criticize the ending from breaking totally from the tone of the rest of the film, its euphoric leap into boisterous music and epic framing wholly at odds with the progression to that point, even the melodramatic climax. But that is a drawback of film criticism, the need to justify each scene within the narrow context of how it fits everything else in the movie. Never mind that literature has enjoyed such breaks for centuries -- Hamlet featured a freaking play within a play, after all. The best parts of great movies can be total separations from the more objective moods for a flash of intense subjectivity (or the other way around, providing sudden clarity the character does not have). The last three minutes of I Am Love so happen to be the best part of a mediocre movie, and for that I am grateful.

L'Avventura

The title of Michelangelo Antonioni's breakthrough feature, L'Avventura, translates to "The Adventure," an ironic header for a film in which practically nothing of consequence happens. When something does, it disappears quickly into the morass of ennui that rolls off the characters as if perspiration. Even the rollicking Italian music that opens the film misleads the audience, who initially reacted at Cannes with such fervent boos that the film's eventual Jury Prize win must have raised a few fists, much less eyebrows.

With time, however, Antonioni's film, the first in a trilogy concerning man's alienation in a changing world, has asserted itself among the vanguard of foreign cinema, a touchstone of the art house movement that blossomed in America during the '60s (Europe was, of course, ahead of the curve). More importantly, it introduced one of the great poets of modern cinema, a man who, in advance of the full explosion of the French New Wave, could visualize existentialism better than any of the Cahiers lads.

In fact, no other filmmaker so deserves the adjective "modern" attached to his name. Until his output slowed to a crawl after 1975's The Passenger, Antonioni captured the changing world with a keenly perceptive and greatly concerned eye, a master of detail whose precision allowed for a sense of grace and ambiguity. L'Avventura, like some of the other great, visually told works of the '60s -- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Playtime -- deals with modernity and changing social interaction. Where both Kubrick and Tati in at least some respects feared this change, however, Antonioni embraces the modern world. What he feared was humanity's separation from the world it had made.

Consider the environment of L'Avventura: far from the space stations and geometrically pure buildings of those other films, Antonioni's work showcases the Old World, from rocky Mediterranean islets formed by volcanic eruptions millions of years ago to centuries-old classical Sicilian architecture. This is not a world suddenly foisted upon an unsuspecting species, yet the characters who inhabit it are just as shiftless and alienated as those who bumble about Tati's sleek, right-angled Paris. As becomes clear in the director's later films, humanity has outgrown its past but has not yet embraced its future, thus trapping mankind in a nebulous limbo that prevents meaningful emotional connection.

That lack of resonant emotion informs the sparsity of the plot. Two friends, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), embark on a yacht trip with two wealthy couples and Anna's lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti). Upon reaching a rocky island a few miles offshore, everyone falls asleep sunbathing, only to find Anna missing. She is never found. In any other film, that might be a spoiler.

But the point of L'Avventura is not the search for a missing friend. Moments such as Anna's disappearance, in which something actually happens, mark the only time the film ever moves quickly; elsewhere, the film plays out arduously, inching forward to capture nothing while that worth capturing happens just outside these people's field of view. Unlike other films with protracted, loose narratives, the bare plot of L'Avventura appears to be the result of the collective disinterest of its characters, too absorbed in their own ennui to give a damn about contributing to a story.

Such aimless egoism informs the mise-en-scène as well. Unlike those aforementioned visual epics, the equally pristine film here is bite-sized; even when characters venture onto the Mediterranean Sea, the frame is restrictive and cramped. Lisca Bianca, the nearly unpopulated island, is photographed in more severe a manner than Ingmar Bergman's desolate Fåro, its craggy landscape communicating the jagged, stony emotional state of the wealthy young group who vacation there.

Their initial reaction to Anna's disappearance is annoyance, which only develops into concern later. Not that the two feelings look all that different in their faces; these characters default to boredom, and their wealth, proof of Italy's recovery in the aftermath of their defeat in World War II, becomes not a means to show the country's progression away from its fascist turmoil to a cooperative and prosperous place but merely a blanket with which to cover their despair. They sail, suntan, screw and preen with perfunctory automation, distracting themselves from their mounting dissatisfaction. When Claudia and Anna go to pick up Sandro at the beginning, the two lovers have sex while Claudia stands outside, impatient. Far from consumed by passion, however, the couple just seems to want a kick to start the day, as if imbibing a much more fun kind of coffee. Later, when Claudia and Sandro return from the island sans Anna, they strike up a relationship mere days after their friend goes missing, and the two begin flirting before they even leave the island.

Claudia and Sandro's relationship does not seem so much an outgrowth of animosity for Anna -- though Claudia does struggle with feelings of budding happiness that her friend is gone, and guilt for those feelings -- but a demonstration of the existential quandary in which humanity has found itself. It no longer matters who we interact with, only that the interactions continue uninterrupted. Without constant repetition of , these people have nothing tangible to cling to, so they place Anna out of mind and gently rearrange people to fill the gaps. Gloria, a writer friend, comes to visit after the characters return to the mainland, and her beauty attracts the attention of every man in a three-mile radius. Yet Gloria, married and not exactly fond of all the ogling, mentions how much work it is to maintain herself, even if she cannot say why she still bothers to work for the leers she does not want. At some point, the difficulty of keeping up with the standard of beauty simply became a part of life, and she cannot break from it, so she continues to act in such a manner because she feels that the universe itself expects it from her. Even Anna's father, a diplomat who ostentatiously rushes out to Lisca Bianca in a catamaran, appears concerned and angry mostly because he understands that a person in his position should act that way.

Shooting this meandering journey of doubt and buried loathing, Antonioni gives form and beauty to what could easily be dismissed as plodding nonsense. Indeed, L'Avventura moves so slowly in places that one cannot counter the argument that the director has no direction with a mere, "That's the point." But the precision of the camera movement belies any claim that Antonioni is futzing about. With the characters unable to even pinpoint their unease, much less confront it, Antonioni communicates emotion as much through blocking as the actors do with their body language. On the island, he separates the characters with extreme space, capturing the mise-en-scène with deep focus yet presenting nothing for the audience to fixate upon. Characters rarely face each other, all of them instead facing forward and speaking as if into the void, arranged in a way as to be off-center without quite aligning to the rule of thirds. The result burrows into your subconscious, communicating underlying tension without resorting to anything other than clever placement. Even the sound design is nuanced, emphasizing the crush of waves against rock faces and footfalls echoing around vast hallways of old Italian buildings now cordoned off as museums, effectively barricading mankind from taking shelter in its past.

That subtlety of direction is matched by Viiti's performance. Antonioni loved female protagonists, believing women to internalize torment more impassively than men, perhaps because society oppressed them for so many centuries that such behavior became ingrained even in progressive types. Claudia occasionally sheds some tears, occasionally looks as if she might lose it, but her madness is not so kind. It will not allow her to vent. Only the hesitation in her voice and the uncertainty of her movement betray the emotions boiling within.

Antonioni refuses even to allow those emotions to flood to the surface, however, even in the quietly horrific finale, which mounts pressure as soon as a stunned and unsure Claudia does not respond to Sandro's marriage proposal seriously. the director begins to shift everyone else around her, surrounding the woman with men who come to resemble the avian foes of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, perched on ledges above and edging near her with predatory stalks. The night after the new couple sleeps in a fancy hotel, Claudia awakens to find her lover gone and hunts for him through the eerily spacious building before at last finding him with a call girl. Even when motivated to strong emotion at last, Claudia storms off lest someone see her break. As if to prove Antonioni's point about the heightened emotional subtlety of women, Sandro completely loses it in shame, unable to look at Claudia or even the prostitute, who tantalizingly asks him for a "souvenir" (the Italian word also translates to "memory"), causing Sandro to harshly throw down a few Lira.

L'Avventura culminates in its most hauntingly beautiful scene, a wordless non-denouement as Sandro catches up to Claudia, only to drain whatever else is left in him as he slumps into a park bench and somehow summons even more tears. Without any exchange of apologies or verbal resolution, Claudia merely stands over the wretched man, eventually reaching out to place her hand on his head. Having reversed from the front to see this action, Antonioni then pulls back to show the characters now facing away from the camera, now too self-absorbed and broken to even look in our direction. Yet the true power of the shot lies in its suggestive framing: to Sandro's right is a giant wall, blank but for the roughness of its texture. To the left, enveloping Claudia, is a shot of Mount Etna in the distance, swirling as if ready to blow. It doesn't, and neither does she, but dark times are clearly ahead for these two, even with their halting reconciliation.

Antonioni made L'Avventura in a time when artistic movements favored detachment, from the beatniks to the cool jazz they loved. There are good aspects to these styles, of course, such as free jazz's adventurous break from rhythmic forms; hell, detachment informs a great deal of the aesthetic of this film. But Antonioni does not want us to stand so far outside art that we no longer truly care for it. When Claudia walks through an art gallery at the beginning, she walks past some snooty appraisers who take a small glance at a painting and say of its artist, "This one has to starve for a while yet." These bourgeois fools care nothing for the content, merely expecting the artist to destroy himself so that some emotion be placed on the canvas, emotion the appraisers then never have to feel for themselves. Later, however, Antonioni shows us an artist, an aloof egomaniac who dismisses the gorgeous models who pose for him as a "dime a dozen" and puts little effort into his work (this idea would be revisited in more detail with the director's English-language debut, Blowup). When people are in their most desperate need for the guiding light of art to show them the beauty and worthiness of the world, the supposed anti-Establishment types are revealed to be no more alienated than anyone else, and that their detachment only separates them from self-knowledge.

The environments of Michelangelo Antonioni's films do not engender madness in the characters who inhabit them; the locations merely facilitate the release of neurosis. "How are you?" Sandro asks Anna after their first coital session at the start. "Awful," she replies, yet when her lover asks her "Why?" she has no answer. With this direct confrontation, Anna cannot deny her anomie, and she writhes in agony on Sandro's bed as he tries to calm her. Anna understands, and so she disappears, perhaps taking her life in despair, perhaps simply escaping from her life to forge a new one with meaning. Before she slips out of the film, however, she becomes the clearest avatar of Antonioni's own intentions: to him, the changing world is filled with potential, but the state of mankind's spiritual existence is too terrifying to tolerate. It may be long, it may be slow, but L'Avventura is a cry from the heart, a plea for the audience to see how terrible, and unnecessarily so, we make our lives. An optimist might say that the director's eventual decline in output could signify that Antonioni saw humanity adapting to its new world, but the dark implication of L'Avventura suggests that people will always be able to create a new world before they will know how to live in it, and that by the time we adapt to the current model, the next shift is about to hit. Maybe Antonioni, incapacitated for years after a crippling stroke in 1985 after being fitfully active over the previous decade, simply grew tired of watching the world slip just out of the grasp of its creators.