d+kaz . Notes on The Dangerous Thread of Things of Eros

I personally found Michelangelo Antonioni’s section of Eros, titled The Dangerous Thread of Things from a story in the director’s book The Bowling Alley on the Tiber, the most interesting and ambitious of the three, Wong Kar-wai’s stumbling over a lame script and emptily aestheticized images, and Soderbergh’s a disposable curiosity. Does Antonioni’s section have its problems? Sure. While I have seen a whole lot of the director’s work, I have not seen his fictional film (co-directed by Wim Wenders) made in closest proximity to this, Beyond the Clouds (1995) and his film shot after but released before Eros, the melancholy, exquisite Michelangelo Eye to Eye (2004) is not in a fictional context and has more in common with the director’s many documentaries and quasi-documentaries. So it is a bit difficult to understand where the director is coming from in his approach to fiction in this film.

The “characters” are obvious abstractions: no effort is made to create anything psychological or social out of the dissatisfied couple played by Cristopher Bucholz and Regina Nemni, nor the third-party younger girl played by Luisa Ranieri. They wander through the film’s emblematic locals (two castle towers, a forked road, a beach-front café, a field of horses, a bedroom, and the final beach) and speak to each other in decidedly pre-formed lines that have little to do with dramatic situation and are more like declaratives. The “plot” is that Bucholz and Nemni are together and fighting, for Bucholz seemingly because Nemni will not give him the sex he wants and for Namni because Bucholz is “oppressing her,” that they are no longer open to talk and feel as they were. The “dialog” is the main problem the film has as a film, centered around the fact that neither Bucholz or Nemni (or perhaps their dubbers, as the film sounds a dubbed) are able to deliver the lines Antonioni and his usually collaborator Tonino Guerra have fashioned for them. The effect is one like the impression I get from one of the few works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet I have seen, These Encounters of Theirs, but more of the impression I get from reading about their work, that of emphasizing actors as people reading lines out loud. Their specific strategy is almost definitely not what Antonioni is getting at, as none of his actors really have the same effect of diction that the Straub/Huillet participants do, but there is definitely an intended disjunctive effect listening to these people talk so portentously and unnaturally about their problems.

And like Straub/Huillet, Antonioni strikingly poses his actors within, outside, and through the natural environment, here also using the Steadicam for the first time I know of in the director’s work. The effect is very much an emphasis on the bodies of his actors, and especially of Regina Nemni, the way she moves, the way she stands, the way she puts on her clothes. For all the beating this film has taken by critics, few seem to see the power of physical beauty Antonioni is evoking bodily and naturally, which goes back to his melding of Neo-Realism and high Modernism in the 1950s and also is influenced by his documentaries that focused on unnatural pieces of art, mostly statues and architecture. This is an exquisitely beautiful film, but a beauty whose meaning is far more abstract than Wong Kar-wai’s retreading of wistful senses of loss. More oblique and ineffable than he usually is, the overall point of the film and Antonioni's his take on eros is unclear. The unnatural approach with the characters and the use of setting definitely makes The Dangerous Thread of Things feel very much like a re-enactment of a primal myth. And the film’s eventual rejection of the continually dissatisfied Bucholz as first one woman and then another fail to make him content is more interesting than the directions taken by the Wong and Soderbergh films. Antonioni ends with the women embracing a sexual openness and autonomy (it is no mistake that Ranieri’s independent girl masturbates pleasantly before Bucholz eventually comes down to make love to her) and perhaps even a friendship than eclipses the banal physical needs of Bucholz.

This being Antonioni, the path the narrative takes is more dictated by space than it is by characters. Open and closed spaces are abundant, mostly in horizons and enclosures. Within these roam the characters, the two women more physically active and comfortable (Nemni’s undressing and dressing especially) and the man, as seen in the “…and out” images below, is intrigued and perhaps overwhelmed by the open world whereas Nemni, as in the scene at the beach café, desires the freedom to embrace it but is held back by Bucholz. I have yet to figure out two of the strongest stylistics in the film, a moment in the café when Nemni gently rolls a wine glass across the floor and the camera whip-pans to a table full of laughing, living people in the café, and a later scene when Bucholz first enters Nemni’s tower and Antonioni crash zooms on a colorful, abstract painting and the next shot is Bucholz removing his earring. But even amongst all its mystery (and a bit of silliness), much of which I can't really interpret, the film still comes off the strongest, most interesting, and most memorable section of the omnibus. I hope some of the images below will be of some interest.

Straub/Huillet poses: