“L’Eclisse” (1962)
When Italian author Alberto Moravia wrote “money is the alien element which indirectly intervenes in all relationships, even sexual,” he could have been talking about Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse,” which closes out the unofficial trilogy begun with “L’Aventurra” and “La Notte.” The film stars Monica Vitti as Vittoria and Alain Delon as Piero, two would-be lovers flirting with the idea of a romance but struggling to understand true intimacy. Haunted by an urban landscape of grandiose modern Italian architecture (juxtaposed with half-built buildings seemingly abandoned because of their outdated style), Delon plays a young stockbroker who gets rich while Italy’s underclass goes belly up. One of these poor fools is Vittoria’s mother, who gambled her savings away. Fresh from her own break-up with an older man, Vittoria meets Piero through this connection and they dance around the idea of being together and professing true love for one another, including several heavy make-out sessions that eventually feel apathetic and empty. In the absence of true connection, these emotionally exhausted characters attempt to manufacture an eternal love, but it never quite gels and is ephemeral as the unsettled winds that give their little city its ghostly and disenchanted atmosphere. “I feel like I’m in a foreign country,” Piero says at one point. “Funny,” Vittoria counters, “that’s how I feel around you,” and it’s probably as direct a piece of dialogue as anyone says in the film. Professing true love, the couple vow to meet on a street corner later that evening, but neither shows up and the film ends with an opaque and ominous seven-minute montage of the empty cityscapes
“Eyes Wide Shut” (1999)
After tackling everything from the First World War and nuclear annihilation to space travel and the world’s creepiest hotel, Stanley Kubrick went closer to home for what turned out to be his final film, “Eyes Wide Shut.” Adapted by Frederic Raphael and Kubrick from Arthur Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle,” it opens up cracks in the marriage of handsome young doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) after he’s propositioned by two women at a party, and she confesses to having had a sexual fantasy about another man. It leads to several long dark nights of the soul as Bill encounters a secret sex cult with great influence and reach, and finds the seedier side of life outside of monogamy before he returns home to the relative safety and happiness of his marriage. Like many ‘relationship in crisis’ movies, it’s a thoroughly moralistic film, delving into taboo-busting sexuality in gorgeous, fascinating manner, showing the perverse temptations that plague the coupled-up, but ultimately suggests that marriage is the best solution we have (Kidman’s last line, “Fuck,” is at once both deeply sexy and incredibly romantic). As always with Kubrick, the filmmaking is meticulous, extraordinary and inventive, but it’s the casting that might be the masterstroke: using two megastars who were at the time in Hollywood’s most talked-about, speculated-marriage gives his examination of a relationship on a knife-edge an almost mythological dimension.
“Faces” (1968)
It took John Cassavetes nearly a decade to make a true follow-up to his stunning debut “Shadows,” a movie that more or less invented American independent film as we know it —he directed a couple of Hollywood gigs-for-hire, but it was only when he self-financed “Faces,” thanks to money from big acting jobs like “The Dirty Dozen,” that the Cassavetes we know and love returned. The first real assembling of what would come to be seen as the writer-director’s rep company, the film stars John Marley and Lynn Carlin as Richard and Maria Forst, a middle-class, middle-aged married couple in seemingly the last throes of their marriage. After he announces he wants a divorce, she goes out with her friends and picks up an aging, smooth-talking playboy (Seymour Cassel), while Richard visits a prostitute (Gena Rowlands) that he’s already met. As is generally the case with Cassavetes, it’s loose and free-form, with its own distinctive style and rhythm that’s caused many to erroneously believe that his films are improvised: they’re not, but you wouldn’t know it from the utterly natural performances (including from an Oscar-nominated Carlin, who’d been working as a secretary at Screen Gems beforehand). It’s not an easy watch, like a more melancholy, more ordinary “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf” in its acerbic bitterness, but amidst the ugliness, the director finds moments of strange grace and beauty. He’d later tackle similar themes with the even-better regarded “A Woman Under The Influence,” giving Rowlands the role of her career.
“A Gentle Woman” (1969)
Robert Bresson’s first film in color, “Une Femme Douce” (“A Gentle Woman”) is based on the Dostoevsky short story “A Gentle Creature,” and focused on the unknowable inner world of the titular ‘gentle woman,’ Elle (Dominique Sanda), who we meet at the beginning of the film, right after she commits suicide. The story is told in flashbacks narrated by her pawnbroker husband Luc (Guy Frangin), as he tries to understand what led her to kill herself. They meet at his store, and struck by her beauty, he follows her home and marries her despite her initial protestations. An odd pairing from the start, the pawnbroker finds himself unable to fully understand his wife as he wants: he appeals to her with trips to the opera, buying her records and books, but still she isn’t happy. Luc becomes more oppressive and Elle becomes more withdrawn, until one night she reaches for a gun to kill him, but is unable to pull the trigger. Instead, she escapes the only way she can, through death —a common escape for Bresson’s characters. As we are told the story from Luc’s point of view, his wife’s world remains mysterious, always hidden just out of frame. The performances are typically Bressonian, with little emotion or reaction given away by expression, though the gentle subtleties of Sanda’s face and movements hint at her inner turmoil. Bresson’s view on materialism vs. spiritual fulfillment are made clear in this film, with hints that the pawnbroker’s obsession with money and “things” led to his wife’s despair, and ergo her death.
“Hannah And Her Sisters” (1986)
Woody Allen’s newer films are so lazily assembled and half-thought-out (with the occasional exception like 2011’s light, charming “Midnight in Paris” and 2013’s shockingly personal “Blue Jasmine”) that it becomes easy to forget what an astute chronicler of romantic malaise the Woodman can be when he’s operating at the peak of his creative powers. The characters in the New York neurotic’s cinematic universe often suffer from moral blind spots and sometimes astonishing lapses in judgment. All of these things occur in spite of the character’s oftentimes considerable education, middle-class status and penchant for refined culture. In his great, masterfully sad chamber piece “Hannah and her Sisters,” Allen probes the innermost workings of a deeply messed-up New York City family plagued by in-fighting, infidelity and worse, and emerges with an elegant and deliciously bitter comic meringue that dissects strained bourgeois values with precision and wit. The action revolves mostly around three adult sisters —the titular Hannah, (Allen’s longtime spouse Mia Farrow) Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey)— and the infatuations, rivalries and betrayals that threaten to undo the fabric of their family. The entire lead ensemble is outstanding here, with Michael Caine in particular giving a gentle, wounded turn as an unfaithful husband who is conflicted about his decisions, and Allen lending his trademark nebbishy energy (before it grew entirely grating) to the role of fast-talking T.V. writer Mickey. Because this is a top-tier Allen film, there’s laughs a plenty to be had, but make no mistake: this is as stinging an examination of marital dissatisfaction as “Scenes from a Marriage,” directed by Allen’s hero Ingmar Bergman, only with the Woodman’s trademark Jewish humor and even more existential despair.
