Am I going to see the new Antonioni, or should one call it the new "Antonioni"? There is something too cruelly appropriate in a director whose essential theme is the difficulty of human communication being reduced, by a stroke, to hermetic silence. Wim Wenders's offer to be the understudying interpreter of the maestro's wishes, when it came to making Beyond the Clouds, is to his credit but does not add to my desire to see the film. Although it is based on a quartet of Antonioni's autobiographical stories, it has interleaved linkage supplied by Wenders and stars the now irreparably mannered John Malkovich. It just might be better to keep one's memories of the author of L'Avventura free of improvements.
I prefer to remember Michelangelo as he was: younger, but by no means young. Jo Janni, the producer, told me that Antonioni had once been a ranking tennis player; I had the feeling that he was of an age and elegance to have played only in long trousers. In the mid-1960s, we were living in Vigna Clara, a suburb of Rome. Jo introduced us to Michelangelo and Monica Vitti. We all had dinner in the Piazza del Popolo. Full of naive piety, I never expected Antonioni to tell a joke, but he did. If it was an old one, I had not heard it before, certainly not in Italian. It concerned the director who dies and goes to heaven. He gets a message that God wants to see him as soon as he's settled. He goes nervously to the Big Office, the door is open and one of the secretaries tells him to go straight in. God comes round the desk to embrace him and asks how he feels about making a celestial movie. He can have anyone from Tolstoy to Shakespeare to write the script, Beethoven loves doing movie scores, Leonardo is in line for artistic director and there is an all-star cast. The director fears that there may be certain limitations over subject matter, but God says that there is absolute artistic liberty in heaven. Isn't that what bliss is about? The director says that he can hardly wait to get started. God puts an arm around his shoulder, walks him to the door, and then says, "The last thing I want to do is try to influence you over casting, but if you could possibly find just a tiny part for someone, un piccolo angelotto..."
***
Janni had known Antonioni at university before the war, in the happy years before the Jannis were dispossessed by Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws. I never understood why Jo did not return to Italy after the war, but he married an English woman, and contented himself with brief visits to his native land. He produced films for Rank, but he was both insubordinate and incomprehensible; they let him go. He had a habit of saying things to people in authority which required them not quite to believe their ears. Once, at Cortina d'Ampezzo, he was irritated by a party of German skiers making a loud noise in the bar. Although scarcely muscular, Jo went over and asked them to calm down. One of them said to him, "You should be ashamed to talk to us. It's because of you Italians that we lost the war. As soon as things turned against you, you surrendered, whereas we Germans, we fought to the last man!"
Jo said, quite softly I imagine, "My God, I wish you had."
***
After our dinner in the Piazza del Popolo, Monica asked us to come to a party at her apartment. As we walked towards the cars, Jo said to my wife and me, "I must warn you, diss is Rome, and a party can sometimes means one thing and sometimes, well, you know about de dolce vita." We decided to take the risk, in the interests of research, and drove to the large apartment block. The door was opened by Monica's mother who welcomed the company, fully dressed, to her birthday party. The only form of debauchery was Chinese chequers. Monica had a collection of boards in various styles. She also had a number of what might have been coffee table books except that they were standing upright on the floor, with their pages ajar. Is/was this a fashion with which I remain too suburban to be familiar?
***
Antonioni had an apartment directly above Monica's. A spiral staircase connected them and when we had had enough chequers, we climbed up and talked with him in his cold, clean drawing room. There was a glass case above the fireplace with clouded Roman bottles in it. One could imagine his genius, aloof, curious and, above all, pudique, modestly maturing behind an ancient veil. If anyone supposes that Antonioni's films were dull or "irrelevant," I can only recommend another look at the sequence in L'Eclisse where Monica Vitti follows the man who has just lost a fortune on the stock exchange to the cafe table where he sits down, calmly shattered, and-am I right?-doodles on a napkin. That, and the minute of silence observed by the dealers, in honour of a dead colleague, between their greedy yells, tells us much more than Wall Street about the cruel innocence of greed. Antonioni might have made many more films had he not been betrayed by the spite of the wheelers and dealers who should have been his colleagues. Unlike almost all of theirs, however, his films survive, slowly.
