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The Eclipse (1962)

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3 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

With L'Avventura and La Notte, L'Eclisse completes an Antonioni trilogy on doomed relationships in a fractured world. This time, Vitti has a traumatic bust-up with the bookish Rabal, and apathetically lets herself get involved with brash young stockbroker Delon. At first glance it's a more formally innovative movie than its predecessors (witness the ending: a long montage that doesn't show the principal characters), but it's underpinned by the same hackneyed symbolism: dawn and nightfall, construction sites, the Bomb, 'ethnic' spontaneity and the rest. Anyone disenchanted with the vacuity of later Antonioni will find the seeds of their dissatisfaction well-rooted in the mannerism and facile anguish evident here.

Author: TR

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

henry fool said...

Posted on Apr 10 2012 22:22 A prime example of why time out reviews are sometimes full of shit. Interesting movie despite the snobbish review

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Craig said...

Posted on May 31 2008 02:29 Vitti at her most beautiful. I would, am ready, have, fallen in love. Delon (dubbed) at his best act. TimeOut, here, misses. Symbolism: none. Mannersim: none. Antonioni: Antonioni. "We'll see each other tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. And the day after that, and the next. And the day after that. And tonight. 8:00... The usual place." Final lines of film. Ten minutes left. We'll "see". Time. Place. Sight. Sound. And yet, most important, the viewer, myself, is left to bring, and find, and take, the rest ....

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Technoguy said...

Posted on Oct 11 2007 10:57 I found this film amazing.Beneath the hedonism and consumerism of modern Italian life there is an austerity of vision and a movement towards abstraction.This is Antonioni at his peak,the black and white period.Monica Vitti has never been better in her exploring the traces of the aftermath of love when she hooks up with the impulsive Delon character.the framing of the shots, the beauty of the cinematography,the use of architecture,the movement from activity to stasis and the marvellous silent ten minute ending,suggestive of apocolypse.

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