There aren’t many actors or actresses I’ll go to see in ANYTHING they do but Monica Vitti is an exception. Somehow it’s enough to merely gaze upon her doing nothing in any one of her collaborations with director Michelangelo Antonioni.  As a flesh and blood symbol of alienation and ennui in contemporary society, you couldn’t find a more seductive icon. “Erotic angst” is how Alan Boshier describes Vitti’s appeal in his perceptive online article at http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/scripts/media_view.pl?id=59&type=Articles

and noted film scholar and author David Thomson sums up Vitti as “inextricably bound up with Antonioni’s sentimental pessimism, a forlorn figure of sensibility in a world of lost feelings and alienated beauty. In other men’s films, she tended to look coarser than Antonioni ever permitted. He made her face graven and her blondeness a sign of spirituality…Away from Antonioni, Monica Vitti has often seemed thick-lipped, husky, and stolid…”  

It’s true Vitti loses some of her fascination in films by other directors but she’s still hard to resist even in a movie as goofy as Joseph Losey’s “Modesty Blaise” – the attempt at a Noel Coward-type musical duet with Terence Stamp is an amusing freak accident in her career (you can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1aoYi4mY7A).

And she was also that rare thing – a sexy comedienne -  in earthy Italian fare such as “The Girl With the Pistol” (check out the crazy clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2-6wz1Ds7c)

& “The Pizza Triangle” (aka “A Drama of Jealousy”).

But it’s in the films of Antonioni that she radiates the soul of Italian cinema of the early sixties – what a vibrant time that was for filmmakers. Never has spiritual malaise or despair looked so damn chic.

It’s a toss-up as to my favorite Antonioni/Vitti film. “L’Avventura” has sentimental value because it’s the first (here’s the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAvUjt7_iE4) but “La Notte” has that sensual nightclub sequence in addition to the great Jeanne Moreau as a similarly lost and jaded jet-setter.

“l’eclipse” has Vitti performing that unexpected African tribal dance in black drag and the justly famous final shot (see the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ergGP0OI8E).  

And at this late date “The Mystery of Oberwald” – Vitti & Antonioni’s last collaboration – looks almost charmingly quaint in its flirtation with video tape over film as a visual medium.

I love them all and sometimes identify with Vitti when she gets horizontal, exhausted by the existential weight of the world.