The Radical Riddler

Eros

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni

The Michelangelo Antonioni tribute Eros-which pairs a short feature by Antonioni with works by Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh-poses an implicit, vexing question: How to honor a filmmaker who refuses to be defined?

With rare exceptions-Blow-Up, for example-Antonioni has avoided genre hooks, creating elliptical, poetic visions of alienation that are more intrigued by architecture, body language, mystery and silence than commercial narrative elements. Antonioni's icy-gentle variant of surrealism is entropic. His films disintegrate as they come together, prompting the uninitiated to ask the same unanswerable (arguably pointless) question: "What happened?" Think of the finale of L'Eclisse, which abandons the film's two central characters-alienated young materialists-and settles on a street corner they once visited, fixating on an unfinished building. By concentrating on objects and people that have nothing to do with the central characters, Antonioni seems to suggest the universe is indifferent to individual drama, however heroic or trivial that drama may be. But here, as elsewhere in Antonioni, the key word is "suggests."

By virtue of its opaque inspiration, Eros denies its filmmakers the easy hooks that might have anchored a tribute to, say, Hitchcock, Capra or Fellini. It lets Antonioni be Antonioni-a riddle within a riddle-while requiring his colleagues to be both Antonioni and themselves, no small feat.

Wong Kar-Wai rises to the challenge with The Hand, about a long-term not-quite affair. Set in the summer of 1963, it starts with a young tailor's apprentice, the virgin Zhang (Chang Chen, pensive and elegant), visiting a prize client, a courtesan named Miss Hua (Gong Li, gorgeously ripe). He's there to take her measurements, but she takes his, cajoling him to drop his trousers, then stroking him to climax. Wang and cinematographer Chris Doyle shoot the encounter in collapsed, off-center close-ups that stress the Machiavellian delight in Miss Hua's eyes, the flush on Zhang's face, the curve of Zhang's ass obscured by the tail of his untucked dress shirt. "Remember this feeling," Miss Hua tells Zhang, "and you'll make me beautiful clothes."

Odd as it may sound, The Hand's opening stroke-job serves the same narrative function as Roy Neary's first encounter with the spacecraft in Close Encounters-a soul-rattling event that implants the hero with a vision he can't shake. As he works on Miss Hua's clothes, he smoothes his fingers over seams, fasteners, sequins-as if by touching them, he can know and possess her. As he visits and revisits her, he finds himself trying to recapture that first rush of feeling, even though she never mentions the hand-job and makes him sit at a table in the next room while she finishes off her clients.

Favoring private moments over historical signposts, The Hand fast-forwards through the decades. Zhang becomes a successful tailor; Miss Hua's life spirals into degredation. As in his erotic feature In the Mood for Love, about an extramarital affair, Wong expresses kinship to Antonioni not narratively or emotionally (The Hand is warmer and sweeter than Antonioni's norm), but visually. Wong's elliptical esthetic is bolder here than in In the Mood for Love; the latter's refusal to show its lovers' significant others seemed a cutesy evasion of the material's darker aspects. In The Hand, Wong uses similarly elliptical techniques to confront the saddest, richest aspects of his material.

Off-center or obscured compositions and close-ups unanswered by reverse angles evoke not just the characters' difficulty at connecting, but their inability (or refusal) to perceive the reasons why. Razor-thin depth of field during an alteration scene keeps the courtesan in sharp focus and the tailor blurry-a correlative for Zhang's losing his sense of self when he's around Miss Hua. Doyle processes any scene dominated by Miss Hua (or by thoughts of Miss Hua) to favor green (fecundity, peace) and blue (emptiness, melancholy). But the scenes in the tailor's shop are tinted gold, conversely expressing acquisitiveness and Zhang's near-religious yearning to possess Miss Hua's essence.

Following The Hand with Steven Soderbergh's Equilibrium is like segueing from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to a knock-knock joke. Scripted by Soderbergh, and shot in venetian-blind-slashed monochrome, it's a comedy about sexual dissatisfaction and dreaming in which married ad-man Nick (Robert Downey, Jr.) recounts a dream involving a nude woman and an unexplored purse while his shrink (Alan Arkin) spies on an office building across the way. Arkin and Downey are a stitch, and the bracketing sequences are fun; Soderbergh shoots them in tropical colors with a woozy handheld camera and scores them to Chico O'Farrill and Tito Puente.

But Equilibrium is thin and ultimately tiresome. Soderbergh has channeled Antonioni before-notably in sex, lies and videotape, The Limey and his unjustly maligned remake of Solaris-without making a big deal of it. But this segment is Edward Albee lite, and it's untrue to Antonioni's spirit because it takes pains to distinguish between the dream and "real" worlds (even though Soderbergh lamely blurs them at the end). Sitting through it, you feel like a theatergoer watching an understudy flounder in a star part that should have transformed his career. (Soderbergh is, in fact, a stand-in; the producers hired Pedro Almodovar as the third director, but he bailed due to a scheduling conflict.)

The master steers Eros back on track with The Dangerous Thread of Things, adapted from his 1983 book Que Bowling sul Tevere, a collection of short stories and sketches for unmade movies. The shameful early critical reception to his segment-complete with gripes about copious nudity, vague narrative and crude, foregrounded symbolism-makes one wonder if viewers have forgotten how to watch Antonioni. The Dangerous Thread of Things is mysterious and direct, playful and opaque-which is to say it's Antonioni through and through, less a typical commercial narrative (wherein the filmmaker does the thinking and feeling for you) than a set of suggestions for future conversations and dreams.

An American named Christopher (Christopher Bucholz) and his Italian wife Cloe (Luisa Ranieri) are staggering through the final stages of a disintegrating marriage. They walk through a forest, squabbling the whole way, and encounter a canyon where lovely young women bathe beneath a waterfall. "Strange that we've never noticed such a magical place," he says. At a seaside restaurant, Christopher spots a beautiful young woman riding a horse across the beach. Cloe says the girl lives in the Tower, then drops her wineglass on the restaurant floor without breaking it. Christopher visits the young woman in her Tower, has sex with her and learns her name without revealing his own.

Months pass, and Cloe, who has moved away, speaks to Christopher via long-distance cell-phone call while a herd of wild horses moves through a field behind her. Antonioni's disarming finale-a woman's naked dance on a beach that ends in a meeting/merger of personalities, echoing the still-cryptic finale of The Passenger-casts every previous situation in an overtly symbolic light.

The waterfall beauties and the woman in the tower might express Christopher's longing to discover (penetrate) the innermost recesses of his wife's personality. The similar-looking Cloe and Luisa might express, respectively, the reality of Christopher's marriage (to a dissatisfied, impenetrable, combative woman) and his fantasy ideal (a compliant, sexually agreeable, emotionally submissive woman). The idealized mate (Luisa) is seen riding one horse while the "real" mate (Cloe) is pictured standing in a field, ignoring the horses behind her.

What do these and other elements mean, exactly? They don't mean anything exactly. Antonioni's films are as expressive, allusive yet impenetrable as T.S. Eliot's poetry and Bob Dylan's lyrics. Writing on The Passenger for a 1999 issue of Other Voices, the critic Jack Turner wrote, "Antonioni's camera is free to explore without the chains of conventional filmic, narrative 'law,' and thus he twists the Symbolic to fit his own personal vision."

That's what makes this 89-year-old director as radical today as he was during his glory years. One must actively participate in Antonioni's films. Like remembered dreams, they coalesce only up to a point-and only after one has resolved to put his ellipses, empty parentheses and question marks in context rather than laboring to fill them in. Antonioni's films express the spiritual yearning, desire for closure and fantasy of centrality that powers human life. Their opacity and incompleteness is an inverted mirror that reflects the eternal urge to reassure oneself that subjective experience of life is the same thing as life, and that existence can be unraveled, explained, controlled. In Antonioni, there are two answers: birth and death. The rest is questions.