Beyond the Clouds Reviews

Michelangelo Antonioni's BEYOND THE CLOUDS tells several tales of romantic obsession, highlighted by the director's gift for creating beautiful images. But this long-awaited production (which was made 14 years after Antonioni s IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN) also contains some truly risible dialogue and acting, making the film a sad blot on an impressive career. The four stories in BEYOND THE CLOUDS are linked by the efforts of a film director (John Malkovich) to understand the meaning behind his cinematic pictures and to find a character for his next movie. In the first episode, a handsome tourist, Silvano (Kim Rossi Stuart) meets a beautiful young woman, Carmen (Ines Sastre) in Ferrara, Italy. Silvano makes a date with Carmen, but, despite his passion for her, he falls asleep in his hotel room that night, then leaves the town the next day without even saying goodbye. Two years later, they meet again in the same town and make another date. That evening, in Carmen's room, in the middle of foreplay, Silvano gets up and runs away without explanation. In the second episode, the filmmaker becomes part of the story as he begins following around another beautiful woman (Sophie Marceau) in the town of Portofino. When she confronts him, she cryptically confesses that she has murdered her father. Next, they go to bed together, but the filmmaker wistfully leaves the woman, still searching for a character for his upcoming epic. In the third episode, set in Paris, a young woman (Chiara Caselli) meets a stranger (Peter Weller) in a bar, but the "pick up" turns out to be a game, for he is her lover of three years. Later, at his home, the man fights with his wife, Patricia (Fanny Ardant) about his mistress. Elsewhere in the city, a businessman, Carlo (Jean Reno), discovers his wife has left him for another man and has taken all the furniture from their apartment. Patricia, who has apparently left her husband, shows up to rent the apartment, and the two rejected mates discover an intimacy with one another. In the fourth and final episode, a young man (Vincent Perez) becomes so enamored of a young woman (Irene Jacob) he meets in the streets of Aix-en-Provence, that he is willing to try to pick her up during sunday mass. Although his seduction fails, he follows the woman home to her apartment, where she tells him, finally, that she is entering a convent the next day. It is somewhat remarkable that Michelangelo Antonioni was able to make another film after his debilitating stroke in 1985, and BEYOND THE CLOUDS, which is based on the director's book, THAT BOWLING ALLEY ON THE TIBER RIVER, shows him in top visual form. There are many haunting shots throughout the film (photographed by Alfio Contini) and the production design (by Thierry Flamand) is striking for a film set in several beautiful, oft-lensed European cities. Had Antonioni made a "modern silent" film out of his material, BEYOND THE CLOUDS might have been a masterpiece, or at least a worthy swan song by the master stylist. But thanks to the incredibly banal dialogue (co-written by the director and Tonino Guerra) and the incomprehensibly inept performances (by some talented actors), BEYOND THE CLOUDS defuses its visual power and mocks the themes of alienation and despair in Antonioni's earlier, better works (L'AVVENTURA, ECLIPSE). The worst part of the film is not the fault of Antonioni, however, but of Wim Wenders, the German wunderkind, who stepped in as a favor to both the director and the insurance companies backing this expensive European co-production. Wenders wrote and directed the prologue and epilogue that stars John Malkovich as the pretentious director. The deletion of these scenes--and the insufferable Malkovich narration throughout--would have greatly improved the film, but, in fairness, Wenders also came up with one of the film's few delights--a brief, amusing entr'acte starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau (the co-stars of Antonioni's LA NOTTE, 1960) as a painter and his wife arguing about "copying" nature on canvas. As bad as Malkovich is (he virtually ruins story two), the usually charming Fanny Ardant gives the film's most laughable performance as the tormented wife in the third story ("It's her or me," she tells her philandering husband before throwing a vase at him). Only the fourth story plays without unintended howlers, although it seems like a warmed-over version of one of the tales in Eric Rohmer's three-part RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS (1996). Otherwise, one of Fanny Ardant's lines sums up the rest of BEYOND THE CLOUDS: "Everything seems ridiculous." (Nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.)