In Memoriam Monica Vitti, Enigmatic Beauty and Exquisite Icon of Alienation

Cinema — or if you prefer, “the movies” — comprises a lot of things, but for a long time one of its greatest functions has been the delivery of beauty. The beauty of the world around us, the beauty of worlds invented by film artists, and the beauty of our fellow human beings. Many movie stars are movie stars because, whatever acting skills they have notwithstanding, they’re beautiful. Beautiful in that they make us gasp when they turn up on screen. There are hundreds of them. Look at Gary Cooper in the ‘30s film Design for Living. Terence Stamp in Billy Budd. Alain Delon in Purple Noon. Has there ever been a more rhapsodic step-into-the-frame moment than Claudia Cardinale’s in The Leopard? And on it goes. 

Monica Vitti, the Italian actress who died today at the age of 90, was one of the most monumental beauties to ever grace the screen. But in L’Avventura, the 1960 art film that made Vitti a star and established its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, as a major (albeit controversial and divisive) cinematic voice, she’s obliged to hide her light under a bushel for a while. It’s an exquisite cinematic fake out. She plays Claudia, the down-to-earth best friend of insolent rich girl Anna (Lea Massari). The characters are attractive women on a getaway, only Anna’s got her studly boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) to get all passive-aggressive with. Antonioni shoots all three characters and their accoutrements (of course Sandro drives a teensy sports car, and drives it like a maniac) with the cool detachment of a behavioral scientist. 

Then, on a boat trip to the Aeolian islands — an impressively desolate volcanic archipelago — Anna disappears. The movie follows Sandro and Vitti’s Claudia as they throw in together to search for her. And as the movie progresses, Vitti — who, make no mistake, has been a wonder to behold all along, her generous mane of platinum hair setting off her gorgeous face in all kinds of fascinating ways, her perfectly groomed brows setting off eyes that sparkle and seethe with equal radiance — really blooms, so to speak. Antonioni stops playing possum and shoots Vitti like the numinous being she truly was. And as Claudio and Sandro seek Anna, they fall for each other. “Eros is sick,” Antonioni said at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, by way of explaining what this movie, which perplexed as many viewers as it ravished, was about. Sandro’s too shallow to appreciate what a gift Claudia is, and by the film’s end Vitti’s character is a poignant representation of grace and forgiveness. None of us is good enough for her. 

If viewers were split on the movie, they weren’t on Vitti, who immediately ascended to the title of “Thinking Man’s Sex Symbol.” The actress met Antonioni, 17 years her senior, in the late ‘50s, when he was working at the Teatro Nuovo of Milan. She dubbed a voice for one of the characters in the director’s 1957 Il Grido. They soon became romantically involved. 

Just as Marlene Dietrich and Josef Von Sternberg were the glamour supreme actor-director team of Golden Age Hollywood, Antonioni and Vitti became inextricably linked through a series of galvanic collaborations. She is a late arrival in 1961’s La Notte, a study of a disintegrating couple played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. Mastroianni plays an author who’s a bit of a shit, not least of all to his wife Lila (Moreau). About an hour into the film, the ever-on-the-hunt Mastroianni spies Vitti, playing the daughter of a rich party host. Here, her hair is jet black, as is the slip-dress she wears. Mastroianni’s character, eyeing her subtle curves, sees her as easy prey, but she’s smarter and more soulful than even the film’s audience might have anticipated. 

In L’Eclisse Vitti walks out of one bad relationship (in scenes set in Rome’s EUR district, replete with eye-popping Mussolini-era architecture), and into another that seems more promising, with a stockbroker played by Alain Delon. They do make a pretty pair, but this love is doomed — as is, the movie implies, all love, not just by neuroses or stress but by a phantom apocalypse that manifests itself in the stunning final seven minutes.

In these films Vitti is sometimes seen playing with her appearance. In L’Avventura, she tries on wigs, and in L’Eclisse, for convoluted and ill-advised reasons related to her character, she tries on a form of blackface. In Antonioni’s world not even beauty could find contentment. In the last film of their ‘60s collaboration, Red Desert, Vitti has a relatively mousy auburn hairdo, playing a wife and mother turning more and more recessive in the wake of an auto accident. Not just that of course — Antonioni’s first color film is set in a post-industrial ecological nightmare through which Vitti’s character wanders like a ghost. She catches the attention of a colleague of her husband’s, played by Richard Harris. Some of the flame we saw in L’Avventura rekindles, but no one is saved. 

Antonioni once said of Vitti that “she certainly inspires me, because I like to watch and direct her, but the parts I give her are a long way from her own character.” That she was so brilliant at embodying the troubled characters Antonioni wrote for her is a testament to a seamless and profound talent. As for Vitti’s own character, it was more antic. She loved comedy, and she made several in Italy during her time with Antonioni, including Chateau en Suede (released in English as Nutty, Naughty Chateau, for heaven’s sake) for hotsy-totsy director Roger Vadim, and the anthology film High Infidelity. 

The 1960s were a wild time, as I’m sure you’ve heard. How wild? Wild enough that a highbrow auteur could make a comic-book movie more or less of his own volition and without the overlording hand of an intellectual-property-managing megacorporation. So Joseph Losey, then of The Servant arthouse fame, endeavored with 1966’s Modesty Blaise, based on the 1963 comic strip that became a novel that became a bunch of graphic novels et cetera. Vitti was cast as Modesty, a wandering orphan turned thief turned criminal mastermind turned secret agent. Losey conceived the movie as a Pop Art satire — in his words, “a kind of parody of the violence for violence’s sake of the spy and Bond-type films.” He had met Vitti years before in Venice, while shooting Eva, with Jeanne Moreau. Losey noticed his leading lady had a real hostility to Vitti, but Losey found her delightful and funny and wanted to use those qualities in his conception of Modesty, who in the film would go up against both Losey regular Dirk Bogarde and, hmm, Terence Stamp. 

“The Monica of Antonioni had not and could not have anything to do with Modesty Blaise,” Losey told the critic Michel Ciment in the late ‘70s. “I’m not meaning to attack Antonioni — he’s a man for whom I’ve got the greatest respect in terms of his work and his intentions — but when I began to work on the film I said to him, ‘The one fear I have is to have a […] situation […] where you will always be present on the set and there will be the pillow-talk of whether you agree with what I’m doing.’ He said ‘No, I’m not even going to read the script I will be nowhere near, etc.’ Well of course it didn’t prove to be that way at all. He was always there, always in her dressing room so she would come off the set and talk to him on every single set up. […] In the end he even okayed the photographs of her which she had the contractual rights to approve. So it was not my idea of what Monica Vitti could be, but his idea of what he’d made her and what she should be.”  

The alliance did not last. Did Vitti find the breakup liberating? Possibly. She regarded one film she made in the wake of the breakup, the 1969 Mario Monicelli comedy The Girl With The Pistol, as a breakthrough: “Discovering how to make people laugh is like discovering you are the king’s daughter,” she told interviewer Alain Elkann. She worked with masters Ettore Scola (1970’s The Pizza Triangle) and Luis Bunuel (1974’s The Phantom of Liberty). She made just one Hollywood film, 1979’s An Almost Perfect Affair, with Keith Carradine. It was shot in Cannes and she did no U.S. publicity for it, because she didn’t like to fly. She reunited with Antonioni for his 1980 video experiment The Mystery of Oberwald, a free adaptation of Cocteau’s The Eagle With Two Heads. Too rarely seen, it’s a film worthy of considered revival. 

In the early ’70s she became involved with the film director Roberto Russo — 17 years her junior. They married in 2000; he was her devoted caretaker as she suffered with Alzheimer’s for two decades. Let’s give Vitti the last word, again from an interview with Alain Elkann: “Love is love. For me, it’s a necessity. I couldn’t live without it. Love is a physical and mental condition that is in the blood and hormones. There are those that don’t know and can’t love. There are those that have fun with it and need it. I need it. I’m passionate.”

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.