Eros

It's always a tricky thing to comment on these 'omnibus' films, where world-renown directors come together to make little films combined as one film. The two that are likely most well known to American audiences, of most recent as twenty years, are New York Stories (featuring Scorsese, Coppola, and Woody) and Four Rooms (Anders, Rockwell, Rodriguez, and Tarantino). None of those films are total masterpieces, due to the fact that there are always un-even bits by the filmmakers, even in the better segments. Eros is no exception, but I would argue that there has been some over-load of flack against the short co-written and directed by 90-something year-old Michelangelo Antonioni. His segment has been claimed by almost all the critics and reviewers (on this site and for the press) has been claimed as a waste of time, as total soft-core porn, the ideals of an old man wanting one last grip on his libido. I didn't find his segment to be a waste, although it is one of his stranger, more enigmatic films in his sixty year career, and it isn't as fascinating as it used to be.

The other two segments are little classics in and of themselves for the younger of the two filmmakers. Wong Kar Wai delivers a touching, sad romantic tale of a tailor's apprentice who has a curiosity about a woman who does something erotic with him on a first visit (hence the title of the segment, The Hand, though it's not as pat a term as might be imagined. The actors involved are all marvelous, and the style in how Kaw-Wai sets up his shots demands attention, despite it being unconventional. The acting is very natural, the music used comes in at just the right moments for emotional contact (you almost anticipate it, and when it comes, it's powerful), and the ending wraps the story up rather fittingly. It goes to show that Kar-Wai might be the most skilled at making romantic-dramas in China, or at least is the most popular.

Steven Soderbergh, likely around the time he directed the slightly off-putting Ocean's Twelve, concocted this sort of comedy of manners, as he says, "so I could have my name on a poster with Antonioni." It stars Robert Downey Jr. and Alan Arkin as a salesman and a psychiatrist respectively, and Downey's character is anxious about his job and, more importantly, about a woman in his dream. Arkin is hilarious in his role as a man who would much rather look out the window with binoculars at someone we do not see in the short. But his physical mannerisms, as Downey goes through his dream to confront himself (filmed in nice black and white, by the way), makes the scene all the more worthwhile. The last shots, jump cuts, of a paper airplane flying out the window are filmed with a fine touch of whimsy. There is also a solid, painterly use of blue in one particular part of the dream scene early on in the segment.

Then we come to Antonioni. First off, let one address the good qualities, or at least the fair, expectable qualities, that come with many of Antonioni's films. In a sense, he's hearkening back to his classic 'trilogy' (L'Aventurra, La Notte, The Eclipse), where a married couple is going through a crisis, and they spend a lot of time not saying anything to one another, and looking out at beautiful Italian landscapes and beaches. In a way, I almost wish this was a feature-length film as opposed to a more or less half hour short. I wanted to know more about these people, about what they do, or what they were doing or going to. But there seem to be two big flaws in the segment (the nudity didn't bother me- there were actually a couple of memorable shots, one of which just a woman's foot on a bed). One was with the music. Some have said that the film is Antonioni's closest trip to soft-core porn. While I would class his directorial eye and style miles above anything on after-midnight Cinemax, the music by Enrica Antonioni and Vinicio Milani is a complete contrast of the music more associated with the director's work, which is either spellbinding in it's atmosphere, or haunting with the usage of rock and roll. Here he uses the music, electronic and with preposterous lyrics, in the more 'erotic' scenes. The other flaw is that, because of the film's short length, there isn't enough time as usual to build up the enigmatic stance of the story. The climax involves the two lead women (one the wife, the other the stranger adulteress) completely nude looking at each other on the beach. While it is interesting to have this image open for interpretation, it is also frustrating in ways that weren't so in the endings to the other Antonioni 'human mysteries'.

I understood some of the implications, but I didn't get the sense of what was lost or what was gained or omitted like in the other two segments. Everything shot and acted looks sweet and tight and concentrated in the segment, still a technical pro, but what exactly is the point? Still, I would not have walked out during the middle of anything by Antonioni, and this, by default the weakest of the bunch, should be open to more interpretation than what Ebert described as "an embarrassment". I felt the eye and mind of an artist working still during "The Dangerous Thread of Things", and my only wish was that I could understand more than what I was seeing and experiencing. Perhaps his segment, like Kaw-Wai's and Soderbergh's, are left up to that interpretation for a purpose. I'll likely want to see all three segments sometime in the future, and maybe get a better take on what eluded me or what enticed me. But, at the least, I didn't leave the theater feeling entirely cheated.

Grade (averaged): B+

Antonioni is not able to direct a 30 min film. Why? The Dangerous Thread of Things deals with a couple trapped in a plain, tasteless life that are no longer able to observe, to feel, to digest the little, happy, natural elements of their lives.What Antonioni wants to show here is that women are passionate, wild , instinctual. Their nudity is not erotic, it's a kind of natural nudity, the original nudity of people lacking shame.Dancing naked on the beach is a kind of Dyonisiac ritual Nietzsche was talking about, the primitive, joyful way of celebrating life. The ideas are nice, he tried to do something great , but he didn't manage because there was not enough time to construct the characters, to make them mean something so by the end of the film we are left with a feeling of dizziness.On the other hand, i didn't like Soderbergh's segment at all maybe because i didn't understand it or maybe I'm trying to get in deep where there is only the surface.

Anyway, Kar-Wai's segment was the best of all three, absolutely wonderful. The story is rather sad(all Kar Wai's characters are melancholic) but the way he works with the camera and the music perfectly combined with the images proves what a great director he is. The scene in which the weaving of the dress is associated with lust, with the wish to penetrate both the mind and the woman's body, well that's Eros, that's how eroticism should be introduced in cinema. Kar Wai proves to be a great tale-or again.

And a very bad last 1/3 by Michelangelo Antonioni. I saw this movie last night at the Elgin Theatre at the Toronto International Film Festival and people walked out after seeing the Wong Kar Wai and Steven Soderbergh segments. I find it hard to rate this movie as a whole so I'll rate each segment of the movie separately. First, there was Wong Kar Wai's short film, titled "The Hand", starring Gong Li and Chang Chen. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the movie, because to me, this definitely portrays what true love is about. It is a very sad story, told with great camera work and the colors were amazing, thanks to Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer. The lighting, soundtrack, and mood were also very enjoyable and complimented each other wonderfully. I rated this part of the movie a 9/10. Then came Soderbergh's short film "Equilibrium". This was more of a comedy, which was very much welcomed since the first part of the film was so sad. Again, the cinematography here was great too, although the story's plot wasn't as easy to follow as Wong's story. The symbolisms were a bit too much, in my personal opinion, but it was still a great short film. I gave this part a 7/10. Then came Antonioni's short movie, which I don't even remember the name of. The plot was almost nonexistent and to me, it was more of an excuse for porn than anything else. Like my friend said, it was as if Antonioni came to America and asked someone what their impression of foreign film was, and made it into this film. I particularly disliked the excessive amount of nudity in this segment of the film, since to me, it posed no greater meaning or purpose. The dialogue also had some of the cheesiest one liners I've seen since Van Helsing. I rated this part a 4/10. Overall, I'd say this movie was a 7/10 mainly because Wong Kar Wai and Steven Soderbergh pulled the average up.

This is one of the most encompassing films I have seen in a while. Not because we have a chance to savor at once three masters at work, no. Opinions of their mastery will differ after all.

It matters because we have three master fiddlers on the same stage, liberated from the pressure of exerting control over the logistics of an entire project, so each one can singularly shape his present moment from his corner of the stage, a small rhythm, trusting the others to compliment and intone. So even though each segment is structured within itself and harmonical, the whole echoes with the assymetry of spontaneous creation. Wonderful.

So three shorts about eros; albeit not erotic in the sense perhaps inferred by the title, not strictly sensual, rather about the desire to see in that space where the senses come into being. All three are highly architectural essays about that space. All three are about some ineffable palpitation of the heart growing fonder, beating faster. All three improvise transcendence.

The structure of the thing we can attribute to our conventional film culture that always waxes vaguely about the abstract (Antonioni), treats narrative engineering as a subject of dry, academic discourse (Soderbergh), and is generally more comfortable to evaluate memories of beauty and touch (Wong Kar Wai).

I am going to write about these last to first, which is also how they resonated with me.

• The last segment is typical Kar Wai/Doyle fashion, unfolding down the corner from In the Mood for Love; so flowery, arrested breathing, quietly exasperated romance with the musky scents of intimacy in close quarters. Of course Mood only blossomed in hindsight of 2046, and there is no chance for that here. So we get a simple beauty about a simple yearning; a young tailor falls for an elegant woman, both strangers. He measures love for her as the silky fabrics he creates to encase her. She constantly eludes him. All that is finally left is a moment suspended in time. It's okay but the least here for my taste, a matter of some poetry.

• Soderbergh for the middle part. Free from the eyes of Hollywood money-men, he creates what he does best and has repeatedly nested in his more famous stuff; New Wave from the gaps of multiple planes of seeing. A man is recounting to his psychiatrist a recurring dream about a woman, who unseen by his patient all this time keeps looking out the window with a pair of binoculars. The whole thing is set in the 50's and aptly recalls film noir as a shorthand, there are venetian blinds, hats, shadows. Most importantly noirish, a double perspective looking to apprehend the controls of nightmare (or dream as in our case).

The update, a French touch: a third layer at the last moment, the base layer of reality last. Piled on that we have the dream about the woman, purely sensual blues, and the mind inbetween, the Rear Window vignette with the psychiatrist, seeking the mechanisms that control these images. He finds inspiration in the dream to apply in real life, a new motto for an alarm clock, and comes to realize who is the elusive woman. Wonderful, structured stuff.

• Finally going backwards we have Antonioni on his last work, the one master two or three notches above the rest and again wildly misunderstood. Several viewers have commented that his segment is little more than the sexual fantasies of a dirty old man. What narrow-minded bunk. What poor reading skills. To even think that Antonioni would have to grow to be 90 to peek at pert nipples. Oh, there is a shot of a woman standing up on a bed fondling her privates, and more nudity; but it's a fantasy only if you completely miss the shot immediately after that posits the whole structure of the house as this woman of mysterious architecture.

No, what we have here is another contemplation on the cessation of self from Antonioni's large contemplative tradition.

You may have noticed that he all but disappeared after The Passenger. There was the stroke and all that. But beyond that, there was nowhere left to go. He had achieved the utmost that film can aspire to be to my mind; sensing in the present purely with the eye, a full awareness of the world as it comes into being and vanishes again. There is nothing more.

So for his part, he films one last time for old time's sake. He takes us on a reminiscing tour of earlier films as though saying goodbye to the whole thing soon to vanish; a couple wandering the ruins of an affair breaking down (L'Avventura, La Notte), youth bathing naked between rocks (Zabriskie Point), the towering old house (a monastery in L'Avventura, where bells were rung), the sense of a concave reality (Blowup).

So the man takes off to explore this other woman, new sex with her that could rejuvenate a life of exasperation. Of course simply pursuing blind new desire is not the answer, so he disappears from the film. The two women meet on an empty stretch of beach.

Antonioni being the wisest of the three, is the only one who leaves us with something tangible to attain. Film doesn't have to be highly complex to be insightful. It can be a simple passage, no more than a woman dancing naked on a beach. The parting shot sums an entire life in movies, a sage's life. The two women standing next to each other, a little apart, not touching, but aware in each other's presence and their shadows connect. It's the most sublime last shot any filmmaker graced us with.

-Kar Wai, segment The Hand: 5/10. -Soderbergh, segment Equilibrium: 8/10. -Antonioni, segment The Dangerous Thread of Things: 10/10

The initial concept for making this film was to offer three variations on the theme of love from three directors from three cultures. Or is the title 'Eros' more about the erotic than about love? Question unanswered by this triptych of minor works by some superb directors. The end result seems to be three streams of conscious thoughts looking for a reason to make it to the screen. With the brilliance of the three directors one would expect far more than the film delivers.

Wong Kar Wai presents the strongest of the three films in a dark story about a tailor who sublimates his desire for a courtesan (Gong Li) by making clothes for her - a 'servant' who finally reverses his role. The photography and interweaving of the characters is very beautiful to experience.

Steven Soderberg makes a testy little script about an ad man (Robert Downey, Jr) in therapy with a bizarre psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) exploring a recurring sensual dream. Shot is black and white the actors give it their all but the story is silly and becomes boring with all the distractions Soderberg works into the weak plot.

Antonioni attempts to breathe life into the old Italian movies of lover's spats and diversions and comes up with what feels like a script-less little mess of a movie bent solely on see-through blouses and nude cavorting on beaches.

As a triptych the film just doesn't become airborne, despite some very high powered, first rate directors. Much ado about very little. Grady Harp