L'Eclisse review – Antonioni's strange and brilliant film rereleased

Sphinx-like … Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni’s mysterious and disquieting 1962 film L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) is rereleased in UK cinemas for the first time in 10 years: a twilight zone of anxiety and alienation in which the director displays his ability to slow time down a stop and allow his characters to wander in an eerily untenanted landscape. He had a knack of making Rome look as empty as the middle of the night – in the middle of the day. Did his film intuit the emptiness of growing postwar prosperity, or just have its own strange vision of the aftermath of nuclear attack?

When I last watched L’Eclisse, for a feature about the Antonioni centenary in 2012, I found myself worrying that it looked dated: especially the startling “blackface” party scene. But watching it again now, I find myself gripped as never before, and the “African” scene is bizarre, stylised, and I think the point is to jab at the leisured classes’ casual racism.

The carina-brutta beauty of Monica Vitti was never more sensual or sphinx-like than here in the role of Vittoria, the well-to-do young woman who embarks on a difficult, doomed affair with Piero (Alain Delon), the nervy, conceited young stockbroker making money for Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) – who herself has become addicted to the thrill of day-trading.

The film really is visionary: it has a gift for unearthly images to compare with Fellini: the crashed car resurrected from the water with the hand of its dead joyrider visible is unforgettable. But it also discloses an enigmatic void in its own strange, hectic little love story: almost as if extraterrestrial forces are preparing this ground for some uncanny incursion.

Antonioni opens up a sinkhole of existential dismay in the Roman streets and asks us to drop down into it. What a strange and brilliant film it is.