One of those rare actresses who could hold the screen just by standing there. Literally. She just stood there and you are afraid to move or avert your eyes because you don’t want to miss anything. Of her just standing there.
Of course she did more than just stand there. In the films she made in the ’60s, primarily with her partner Michelangelo Antonioni, she was a chameleon. His mysterious masterpieces – heavily debated at the time – a series of films coming one after the other, presenting “alienation” in all its disturbing guises, and all starring Vitti – L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse – turned her into an international superstar. Red Desert, also intriguing – and the only one in color – is a kind of Coda to the alienation project.
She was so associated with these films – and will be forever – that her career afterwards suffered in comparison, although she continued to work, of course! You can read more about her journey in the excellent obit in the New York Times, which ends with a fascinating quote I had never heard before. She was constantly asked – as was Antonioni – about the unsolved mystery in L’Avventura about the missing Anna. Where did she go? Did she fall off that rocky island? Why was the body never found?
What was Antonioni trying to say? It was MADDENING to audiences and critics that the film refused to provide the answer. Vitti was asked about it right before the film was released and here is her perfect reply:
That’s the one question the audience isn’t supposed to ask. It isn’t important. What is important is that Anna was carrying two books before she disappeared — the Bible and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. One suggests our concern with morality; the other was a literary experiment in which the heroine disappears halfway through the book and is replaced by another protagonist.
You can see why Antonioni considered her a muse.
Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian master, was inspired by L’Avventura and its mystery to make what is practically a remake (or at least heavily inspired by), 2009’s About Elly. The astonishingly beautiful and excellent Golshifteh Farahani (maybe more familiar to American audiences for her role in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson) in the Vitti-esque role.
Vitti’s inspiration is worldwide.
You know how I love scenes where people are alone with themselves and their reflection in the mirror: in L’Avventura, Monica Vitti has a great one: It’s exactly the kind of mirror moment that obsesses me. And it’s even more striking since that movie is so tormented and mysterious and terrible. Like … out of that landscape and emotional atmosphere, suddenly comes …. this.
What does a movie goddess do when she looks in the mirror? She doesn’t necessarily primp and preen. Sometimes she makes funny faces. Even surrounded by the “sick soul of Europe”, as Pauline Kael called it.
Vitti could sometimes blend into the background so totally she’d almost vanish (which was amazing, considering her beauty), but you look at her face and you’d see this constant flickering montage of emotions. In La Notte, where she’s first seen at a party, goading and teasing the moody hero (Marcello Mastroianni) across a room-size board game (bocce? sorry, it’s been a while), she has pitch-black hair, not blonde, and she seems totally changed from who she presented as in L’Avventura. It’s a reminder that she’s a great beauty and a great actress. Captivating, but in a very different way.
In La Notte, you were never quite sure where she was at, emotionally, who she was, particularly in comparison with his restless insomniac depressive wife, played by Jeanne Moreau.
Vitti could be intriguingly blank, which makes her pairing with the Master of Blankness, Alain Delon, in L’Eclisse so intriguing. They ooze unease, psychological and even existential restlessness.
Two more gorgeous movie stars cannot even be imagined, and they are overwhelming together onscreen. When the blankness arrives in L’Eclisse, and it arrives in such a total way that it empties the whole entire world in the most eerie final sequence in cinema. The blankness starts within the two characters and radiates out into the universe, just the mushroom cloud and its annihilating radiation. Incredible film.
But let’s go back to her blankness. Blankness has always intrigued me, and I was writing about it here long before I ever got a real gig as a writer. Vitti’s intermittent blankness is a perfect projector screen for what we out here in the dark THINK she’s thinking. We fill in her blanks. This ability is one of the hallmarks of a great movie star. They all have a version of it. There are no exceptions.
Don’t give us TOO much. Leave some of the work to US, because in that “work” pours our dreams and fantasties, our self-projections and unfinished business … and THAT’S how you hold an audience’s attention. There’s a reason Monica Vitti has remained a beloved star for decades, long after she stopped working. We will never get to the bottom of her (or, at least, her onscreen persona).
Also, side note: her hair has always filled me with envy. She and Gena Rowlands are the Two Pillars of Great Hair, which I – and my thin hair, which resists curling or even full body – could never achieve.
Movie Goddesses aren’t made like Monica Vitti anymore. She was wholly European, emerging from the ravages of war, dissociated, blank with inexpressible trauma, emblematic of the hopelessness of the time, of the rise of the atomic age, the memory of the mushroom clouds over Japan, the sense that humanity was doomed.
The world has changed so much. She was part of her specific world and time and era, but she translates into all times and places. And so, we won’t see her like again. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, or in the same way. But at least we have her, and she – like Greta Garbo, like Marlene Dietrich – is still a projector screen for everything swirling around in our own psyches. That is eternal.
Update: I was hoping my friend Dan Callahan would write on Monica Vitti, and he has over at Ebert.
