为安东尼奥尼工作

Michelangelo Antonioni: Days with the Maestro
By Peter Weller


It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Peter Weller–first an aspiring jazz musician, then an acting student–grew fascinated by the films of Antonioni. Weller had made his name as a movie actor–in Shoot the Moon (1982), Robocop (1987), and Naked Lunch (1991) among others–by the time he was properly introduced to Antonioni at the Taormina Film Festival in the summer of 1992. There, Antonioni asked Weller if he would care to appear in a forthcoming film. Weller, honoured, was nevertheless sure that the maestro's poor health would preclude such an undertaking. Happily, he was proved wrong. In these extracts from Weller's short memoir of the experience, published as "Days with the Maestro" in the compendium Projections 12 (Faber and Faber, 2002), Weller relates the impact upon him of seeing Antonioni's films, making the great man's acquaintance, and then being directed by him in Beyond the Clouds (1995).

[In early 1993] Michelangelo comes to LA. I have dinner with him in an elegant Chinese restaurant and invite two friends, screenwriter Mel Bordeaux and film director Mike Figgis. The communication is difficult, Michelangelo attended by an assistant and interpreter. He is in LA for a special UCLA screening of The Passenger, introduced by its star, Jack Nicholson, who owns the film. I can see Michelangelo is exhausted and looks far more fatigued than he did in Taormina. Figgis and I ask him many questions about L'Eclisse, the last of Antonioni's trilogy of modern love stories, including the aforementioned L'Avventura and an opus with Marcello Mastroiani and Jean Moreau entitled La Notte. For all their innovation, all three are simply love stories.

L'Eclisse is a beautiful excursion through the distracting relationship of a lovely upper middle class girl, once again Monica Vitti, and a stock broker on-the-drive, a gallant-looking Alain Delon in my favourite of his performances. The opening sequence of L'Eclisse is a tour de force on the end of a romance. The camera focuses on a lamp inside an apartment in the suburb of early 1960s Rome. There sits a handsome man in his thirties (not Delon) in a white shirt, black slacks, the remnants of evening wear. On the sofa is Vitti, gorgeous blond tresses falling about shoulders and a black dress. They sit in stillborn silence. She meanders as he watches her. He shaves, she meanders. Five minutes without so much as a word. But this is not midnight. This is dawn. They've been up all night. And they've said what they have to say. And this is the end. Finally she says she must go, and he asks her to stay a bit longer. But they have nothing more to say. And all of us who have ever put toothpicks in our eyes until 4am to 'get to the bottom of it' with a significant other know there is nothing more to say. And yet we don't want to approach that threshold of "Adios."

Vitti first meets Delon in the stock exchange in Rome. The stock exchange is a maddening sequence where Vitti has gone to retrieve her mother from the miasma of frantic inflated post-war gambling, when the populace was allowed into the exchange to scream at their respective brokers, like a Wall Street horse race. Delon, a stockbroker, and Vitti go through the "Come here, go away" of new love set against an opera of racism, the Bomb, and the growing assault of media. The lovers court, both aware of something missing, but what? They live in, but are unaware of, the barrage of everyday distractions. Is the romance worth the trouble? In the end they make a plan to meet at a street corner where they first romanced. They speak this plan to one another in one of the most touching exchanges of lovers' dialogue I've ever seen. They part. The afternoon passes. Images of the old and new Rome. A man gets off a bus reading about nuclear testing in the U.S. A horse-drawn cart clip-clops down a modern boulevard. The camera moves to the street corner, to an old water barrel where the lovers had their first rendezvous. Night comes and the streetlights go on, but no one comes. And the film ends. Do they get together? This is the eternal film-school question of L'Eclisse. And Mike Figgis and I want to know.

Michelangelo smiles and shrugs. "Non so" ("I don't know.") And it's not that he isn't telling. He says it like he does not know. And he'd like someone to tell him what happened! Figgis and I look at each other. Damn. Later on, in Paris, I will ask him, "What happened to Lea Massari?"–the missing girlfriend for whom Monica Vitti and Gabriella Ferzetti spend the entire movie searching in L'Avventura? He will shrug again. "Non so." At this dinner in L.A. in 1993, I don't reprise the Taormina discussion of his future film. The way he looks, it seems further from reality than ever.

[But come the Fall of 1994 Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds did indeed start rolling in Paris. In New York, Weller received a call asking him to star in the last of the four short stories that would comprise the picture: 'Nole me Tangere', in which a married man conducts an affair but cannot bring himself to renounce either his wife (Fanny Ardant) or his mistress (Chiara Caselli.) It was time for Weller to experience how a master director could convey his intentions to his actors without the power of speech...]
Paris: Tuesday, February 28 1995.

The scene says this: I walk into a bedroom. My wife (Fanny Ardant) holds a vase. I ask what is the matter. She looks at the vase and asks back, "What does a vase make you think of? Vase–flowers. Flowers–beauty. Beauty–that 23-year-old bitch you've been seeing for three years?" She breaks the vase. I tell her it makes me sad to see her behaving like this, drunk and sick. Then I kiss her and tell her I want to make love with her. She demands that I give up Chiara, which I promise to do. End of scene. That's what's written. Alas, none of this is on Antonioni's agenda.

First thing–he wants her to break the vase. "With me watching?" I inquire, as does Fanny, Beatrice, Alfio the cinematographer and Enrica. "Dio mio" ("My God"), the maestro raves. Everyone loves it when he raves. It is only his frustration with his own communication skills. We love it because this is an 84-year-old man, whom everyone had given up for dead, bursting forth like a shot in the ass for all of us. So we all shut up and listen. Yes, contrary to the script, he wants her to break the vase first, without me there. He gets up. He mimes for her to break the vase, then he walks her back into the bathroom and mimes for her to get into the shower in her slip. He wants her to sing in the shower. Then he mimes for me to come in and see the broken glass, kick it aside and find her in the shower, then kiss her.

"You want me to get into the shower with her, Maestro?" He smiles. He mimes for me to kiss her through the glass. Did he just make that up? Now I'm wondering when all this dialogue about vases and beauty begins. Michelangelo then asks her to walk past me out of the shower, for me to follow her out of the bathroom, back into the bedroom where he wants her to sit down on a stool, look at the broken vase, and begin to speak.

So: I go downstairs and wait for them to shoot the beginning with Fanny breaking the vase. I wait. I wait. At one point I noodle some Bach on a piano in the foyer. "Si!" I hear from above. Figuring they're ready to shoot upstairs, I quit playing. Beatrice jumps out the door and yells down to me, "Peter, Michelangelo wants to move the camera out here and shoot you playing the piano as if that's what you do when you come home." Okay. The guy uses everything, including my terrible piano. He shoots me playing the Bach as a kind of "Honey, I'm home" motif.

We move upstairs to shoot the meat of what he just showed us. And what was, on the page, a turgid, heavy scene from the get-go, now becomes a sort of a loony flirtation between married folks. Fanny breaks the vase. Goes into the bathroom, steps into the shower, begins to croon. I walk in after no response to my piano, see the broken vase, hear the singing from the shower, and, expecting to find a naked wife, walk to the bathroom. I pass the broken vase, wondering what went down here, kick the larger pieces away, and lo and behold, find a wife in a slip in the shower. She presses her voluptuous lips to the glass. I start laughing as I kiss her back and she opens the shower door and pushes past me through my first line "Qu'esqu'il passe?" She chuckles, goes into the boudoir and sits down. I follow, enjoying this goofy stuff, and she starts with her indictment of me with the vase speech. Which only now has turned the expectation of marital fun and frolic into a confrontation of lies.

Thus Michelangelo has extracted a subtle yet wonderful reversal. What was a one-note heavy scene, now starts off as a whimsical event, transforming into a foreboding one. We finish the second beat of the scene, me kneeling in front of Fanny as she weeps, finally pushing me away. I fall backwards and accidentally cut myself on the broken vase. She throws herself on the bed. I follow her there, kiss her foot and bite her on the ass. She bites my bleeding hand, tells me in French to go fuck myself, which prompts me to beg her to make love with me. I promise never to see Chiara again. She rolls on top of me, we kiss. Cut.

Acting is beginning to rejuvenate me. I don't know where I'm going in this flick, but I must completely trust an octogenarian speech-impaired, cane-walking romantic. For only Michelangelo knows the vision and the outcome of this density. It is his canvas, in which I am an image...
Los Angeles: Monday March 27 1995

... Michelangelo receives the special Oscar for Life Achievement. I am sitting in the apartment of a friend. The roll call of folk present (all of whom gather every year at my friend's house to watch the Oscars) represents a cross-generational "Who's Who" in movies and music...

Halfway through the Oscars, Jack Nicholson appears on screen to present the award to Michelangelo. Through a montage of scenes from Il Grido, Red Desert, L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, The Passenger and Zabriskie Point, Nicholson narrates a concise and accurate pr茅cis of Michelangelo's unique contribution. He speaks of the space, the undefined void between men and women, the place and time where speech is meaningless, where words dissolve and no longer heal, where the modern age has devoured passion, love, hope, joy, like the Pac-Man of excess. I sit next to Sophia Loren, herself next to her husband, Carlo Ponti, a quiet and erudite man, and a master producer with an immense legacy to cinema. As each film clip appears, I mutter the name of the film to myself.

"Tell me," asks Sophia. "How do you know these films?"

"I've seen them all. I just worked with him."

No!" I detect jealousy.

"Yes."

'My husband produced two of his films.'

"Yes, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger."

"I never had the pleasure of working with him," she mourns.

"It was splendour," I say.

She smiles. "You are fortunate."