When this came out, postmodern literature was hitting its prime. Nabokov, Beckett, etc. Pontano says he knows what he wants to write but is struggling with how to write it. We wonder if he even cares about art at all or if it's just a mechanism for him to get women, or to feel important.
Love is dead. We go from island to island of affection, mindless of the substance, just searching for the next pleasure. This is confirmed in the end when Pontano doesn't recognize something he'd written a long time ago. There's no artistic identity, no purpose. Do we all die like Tommaso, disconnected from friends, family? Pontano's notion of the intellectual is as an obsolete hermit, and one who considers taking a PR job -- the soul is dead in the modern world. I'm sure this is what Antonioni was struggling with.
The use of architecture is wonderful. The staging shows beams intersecting human interaction, reflections in windows offering different angles, ghosts of the postmodern world. Figures receding into shadows, emerging into light. The opening descent is a reflection of the city in one of its bodies, as all the bodies in this film are just reflections of one another, in decline.
In the end they leave the convoluted architecture of the house and emerge into nature. But the nature turns out to be a golf course. We're all trapped in the world we've crafted.
Love is dead. We go from island to island of affection, mindless of the substance, just searching for the next pleasure. This is confirmed in the end when Pontano doesn't recognize something he'd written a long time ago. There's no artistic identity, no purpose. Do we all die like Tommaso, disconnected from friends, family? Pontano's notion of the intellectual is as an obsolete hermit, and one who considers taking a PR job -- the soul is dead in the modern world. I'm sure this is what Antonioni was struggling with.
The use of architecture is wonderful. The staging shows beams intersecting human interaction, reflections in windows offering different angles, ghosts of the postmodern world. Figures receding into shadows, emerging into light. The opening descent is a reflection of the city in one of its bodies, as all the bodies in this film are just reflections of one another, in decline.
In the end they leave the convoluted architecture of the house and emerge into nature. But the nature turns out to be a golf course. We're all trapped in the world we've crafted.