Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

surfaces or points. All of the optical field makes itself accessible uniformly, so that Ortega’s “luminous hero” (of the Quattrocento) is merely a trace memory or a vague hope (“Point of View”). Direction impossible, pathways are indistinct and unnavigable, the lights of the heavens are inaccessible through their very profusion and constant motion, philosophy is a riddle. We move in a fog.

      The eloquent and magnificent fog sequence in this film:

      Niccolò, certain that his house is being watched, escaping through the back door and racing in his silver car to Mavi’s house; fetching her and driving into the country, because he knows that villa he rented once. But on the way they encounter a field of mists, or rather what seems a cloud that has given up its immortality and dropped to earth. The suddenness of this manifestation, its impenetrability, the feeling we must have that Niccolò and Mavi have been waylaid in their life journey by an obstacle that is at once material and insubstantial, practical and ephemeral. As Niccolò advances, the cloud swallows them. “Drive slowly,” says Mavi. A close shot of the white lines slowly slipping under the wheels. “I can’t see,” she says, and he promises to just follow the white line. Directional placards loom up out of the whiteness. Swerving left and right, they hope they are on the right road. A gray sheen of darkness doesn’t quite illuminate them in the car as, through the rear window, we see the papery surface of the fog. A cigarette for Mavi. She offers it to him, and another car’s lights swing up from behind. They kiss. The vehicle behind has gone, but Niccolò sees a traffic light blinking lazily. He stops and gets out, a dark shadow against the swirling mists. The road is glistening. His footsteps as he walks away are crisp and clear, a metrical voice.

      After a few steps he stops and looks around. A dog is barking somewhere. A car, its headlamps blazing into the fog and turning it to pearls. Niccolò watches a man approach a bush, turn, walk away. The sound of another car revving up. The low ticking sound of steps—no, the mechanism of the traffic light, and a whistle as of a train. He backs away as a car approaches going the other way, passes him, turns off-screen. Mavi strains to see through the windshield and confronts nothing in the mist but the headlamps of a parked car blinking on and off into her face. She becomes anxious, opens her door, stands up. Hazy amber light floods her face from the traffic light. “Nic—where are you?”

      Out of the depths of the cloud: “I’m here.”

      His body approaches.