L'Eclisse

L'Eclisse (1962) is Michelangelo Antonioni's romantic drama, available to watch online on iFILM. At dawn in Rome, Vittoria walks out on her fiancé Riccardo. No fight, no tears. The feeling simply ran out, and she knows it.

What follows is less a plot than a drift. Vittoria visits the chaos of the Roman stock exchange, where fortunes evaporate in minutes, and meets Piero, a brisk young broker played by Alain Delon. Monica Vitti gives Vittoria a restless, watchful stillness. The two begin something like an affair, yet both keep stepping back, observing each other as if from across a room. Antonioni films the empty spaces instead of the romance: bare intersections, raw apartment blocks, the objects people leave behind once they stop caring.

This closes his trilogy of alienation after L'Avventura and La Notte. The famous final montage runs seven minutes with no characters at all, just streets and fading light. It is slow and demanding, and for anyone drawn to European modernism it lands hard. Stream L'Eclisse (1962) online on iFILM.