Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Double Feature Series #3: Sex, Love, & Jealousy

This is the third post in what I'm calling my double feature series, in which I post a pairing of two movies that I love. These movies will usually be made 20+ years apart and are thematically related somehow. I see one as a sort of a spiritual successor of the other. The point is to avoid blatantly obvious pairings or homages that have been pointed out before (like certain Woody Allen movies combined with certain Bergman movies, for example). Instead, I aim to bring two seemingly disconnected films together, into one thought.


The third entry in this series, as the title indicates, pulls together two films about relationships. They are:


La Notte (1961) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Now, of course, you may have seen Eyes Wide Shut, and you may think that it is not so much about a relationship as it is an exposé of the cabal of shadowy, sex-crazed, rulers of society being exposed by a now-dead Stanley Kubrick (obviously by their hand). Well, you would be wrong. It is neither that, nor is it a film about a secret cult, nor is it even really an erotic thriller. (It is obviously kind of about these things, but you take my point.) The film is about the relationship, the marriage, between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's characters.

La Notte is a film by Michaelangelo Antonioni, one of my favourite directors. It is also a film about a relationship. This time between Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau's characters — also a marriage. Like Eyes Wide Shut, which takes place over roughly 48 hours, it takes place in quite a short time span, around 24 hours. This one is a little more contemplative, and less mysterious than the former. In some ways it is Eyes Wide Shut stripped bare of the mystery and intrigue, it is a pure and direct distillation of the throes and neuroticisms of this particular marriage. Before I get into some comparisons proper it is worth noting that, in 1963, Kubrick himself, in the only list of his favourite films publicly available, ranked La Notte as his 7th favourite film of all time. Assuming he continued to love this film as time went on, I think the comparison is quite apt.

In the first part of La Notte, we watch Mastroianni and Moreau visit their friend in hospital followed by scenes of her wandering about Milan, alone. In these vignettes, Antonioni shows us how both partners yearn for and fantasise about new romantic connections. They are alone and alienated from one another, even when together. Though Mastroianni, the man, is obviously more willing to sublimate this desire than Moreau, she too has her fantasies. This mirrors the scenes in Eyes Wide Shut, those where Cruise walks the streets of New York encountering, in like vignettes, different possibilities of sexual encounter, and those where Kidman confesses her fantasy of the sailor to Cruise. 

Following these scenes we see Mastroianni and Moreau get ready for a party, which will be the centrepiece of the film. But before that, we see them at a bar watching a performer contort herself to soft music while balancing a wine glass, in a sexually charged way. Mastroianni watches her intently, perhaps fantasising about her, while Moreau watches on in jealously, trying to bring his attention back to her. Whether or not he is thinking about this woman in such a way, he always has plausible deniability that he is not. "I'm just watching her perform" he can always say, automatically blocking any concern from Moreau as 'unreasonable' jealousy. However, our emotions are not unreasonable. What makes this scene great, and more heartbreaking, is that both characters understand this dynamic perfectly well. Mastroianni understands that he is making her upset, but he has stopped taking her concerns (no matter how silly) to be legitimate. 

We see this same sort of dynamic mirrored in Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise is a doctor who Kidman frequently imagines as one touching beautiful women's breasts every day while he is on the job, perhaps he is revelling and fantasising about being with these other women, or they with him. Cruise's retort, perhaps not unreasonably, is "Alice, I happen to be a doctor." But nor is it unreasonable, as is implied by Cruise, that Kidman is merely jealous or anxious about this states of affairs. Firstly the movie has established she might have independent reason be this way, but secondly, and more importantly, you can hardly blame her feeling this way. In both movies, the man is belittling the woman and treating the way they feel as illegitimate. They are not treating them the way they take themselves to be, as a complete and reasonable person, one that is complete without their partner's love. They enjoy the thought that they could leave and find someone else, but she couldn't. 

Part of what these movies show is that this is not true. It reminds the men (perhaps all men) that women absolutely can and will find someone else, and that we should not make ourselves so comfortable with the one we love. The thought that one's partner is a bundle of properties to be substituted out or merely a complementary property of one's own soul, rather than a soul of their own to be committed to, is exactly the kind of complicity that leads to the jealousy, alienation, and loneliness within a romantic relationship depicted in both movies, especially La Notte. It is to forget that we have to make ourselves worthy of our partner's free choice. This is reflected in Moreau's sardonic retort to Mastroianni's gaze at the other woman, "please don't always belittle me, I can have thoughts of my own" and in Kidman's revealing to Cruise her own profane fantasies about leaving him for the sailor, "I was ready to give up everything...my whole fucking future." Both are attempts by the woman for recognition from their partner, attempts to level the playing field. The difference is that the former lands as an impotent groping in the dark, easily shrugged off by the man, while the latter manages to open a deep psychic wound. 

The rest of the film follows our favourite couple through a party of bourgeois businessmen and aristocrats. At this party, Mastroianni meets and attempts to pursue an indelible Monica Vitti, playing a younger, playful seductress. As he steals a kiss, we see Moreau looking down on them from the floor above in silence. Mastroianni continues his pursuit but fails due to Vitti seeing he is a married man. Moreau herself steals off with a man to see if she can't do the same, with the same levelling impulse as before. (This chapter is titled "Two Pairs.") She is trying to assert herself as her own person, trying to show herself that she can defy him. But she fails here too, she cannot go through with it. 

We see a remarkably similar scene of this kind at the very beginning of Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise and Kidman head to a party in a very opulent mansion where two models attempt to seduce a willing Cruise who doesn't mention his wife, and an older man attempts to seduce a less willing Kidman, who does mention a husband. For the men in both movies, it is the social role of husband, rather than the romantic love of their wife that calls for subterfuge and holds them back in their sexual endeavours. Both men desire the anonymity of the Venetian masks, worn by the secret society, that would allow them to shed the social expectations and trappings of real life, and to act on their dreams, desires, and fantasies. 

The difference between these films is their endings. The same content is revealed to each of the participants in their respective marriage. Each character is taken through the workings of their partner's mind with regards to their sex life, love life, their moods and jealousies, and ultimately the deficient nature of their relationship with the other. This can go one of two ways. La Notte depicts a relationship further down the road of alienation from each other, unable to be turned back, while Eyes Wide Shut, depicts one on the precipice, still able to be saved. 

At the end of La Notte, we see the couple talking alone at dawn after the party, on what looks like a golf course there at the property where the party was. Moreau is at the end of her line, telling him she doesn't love him anymore, as he obviously doesn't love her. We see Mastroianni desperately grabbing hold of the relationship already lost, begging her to express her love back to him, likely more afraid of being alone than of losing her. She then reads out an old passage of writing he once wrote for her, now farcical, about her sleeping in the morning. It is implied that this was early on in their relationship when there was still some enchantment between them. 

Even then you can tell he loved her not as her own person, but as a vain guarantee of his own worthiness. He writes (in the passage for her): "you almost seemed lifeless...but the thought of disturbing your sleep, of having you awake in my arms again, held me back. I preferred you like this, something no one could take from me because it was mine alone...Beyond your face I saw my own reflection." This passage reveals the rot at the heart of the relationship. What he really wants is a guarantee that he is loved, and he is lovable. He does not actually want what love really has to be if it is to be successful: a union of two souls individually choosing to subordinate their lives to another in a way that respects them as their own person with their own desires, goals, and projects. This is why when Mastroianni looks into her, he only sees himself. He seems to come to this realisation himself, "I haven't given you anything" he says, "it's strange to realise only now, that what we give to others comes back to us." This is the end for them.

At the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise comes home to see the mask he had worn to the party in his bed. However, it is not merely the mask he wore to the party, it is also the mask he has been using in order to facilitate the close sexual encounters he doggedly pursued throughout the night, and perhaps throughout his life with Kidman. It is the mask he had been wearing in order to shed the responsibility he has to to be faithful to the other whole part of his marriage. In seeing this Cruise comes clean to his wife, presumably about the whole night. I believe this movie, contrary to La Notte, has a happy ending (in a suitably qualified way). In the final scene when they are taking their daughter shopping, it seems Cruise has come to respect his wife as an individual. He asks her "What do you think we should do?" An indication that the ordeal, both his experience that night and the revelation that she has her own desires she could act on, has instilled in him a new respect for her agency. And the fact that they are able to talk through this with each other, that Cruise was able to get over himself, and the fact that they love each other, Kidman remarks, "we should be grateful. Grateful that we've managed to survive through all of our...adventures." 

The reality that both partners fantasise about others ("that no dream is ever just a dream"), rather than being cause to break up their relationship, is actually a rallying cry, an always-present possibility. It is a constant reminder to the other that they are an individual, and that, in a relationship, they have to make themselves the kind of person their partner would choose to be awake with, rather than one who begets in them dreams about others. And doing this requires respect for them as their own person with their own soul and their own freedom. It seems to me that Cruise and Kidman eventually do what Mastroianni and Moreau fail to do: love each other.



No comments:

Post a Comment