The house is quiet and dark. The cats sniff and rub the corners of things noiselessly. I’m alone on the couch, girlfriend in another country. I am fascinated by Monica Vitti’s hair. On the screen, Vittoria wanders and writhes around her fiancé’s house, toying with his things, disturbed by herself in the mirror; he demurs in a chair like a wax figure. For ten minutes, maybe more, they trade looks in his wordless house, situated in a suburb of Rome, trimmed lawns, straight streets, and a large mushroom a block away, visible from the window, a water tower somehow more than a water tower.

She is about to leave Francisco, for good. Or perhaps not. She cannot decide. Vittoria’s eyes glow, now with hatred, now with pity, now with love. He is by turns imploring or confident or wooden. After fifteen minutes of this, I begin to feel how the house traps them, the carpet, the double-glazed windows, the lampshades. When she finally makes it through the door, then the gate, and down the street, that hemmed-in feeling still cloaks her. Under the sky, between the trees, she is still trapped.

In the lines of the streets and buildings, the heaviness of objects and facades, she is a visitor, among the things others have made. From the quiet of residences to the tohu-bohu of La Borsa, the stock exchange, where she meets Piero, to Piero’s parents’ velvet-draped wood-paneled lugubrious house, she is a tiny doll wandering a leaden geometry. And he is a marionette, stiff with her uncertainty.

Walking, they see a sprinkler jetting over a vast park lawn. She puts her hand in and laughs. Passion continually spouting forth, if only from a small opening. She walks alone and arrives early at the unfinished building, draped in dark material, edifice already. A drum filled with rainwater, in which she sets a scrap of wood afloat. Passion ceaselessly running out, if only a trickle drawing a path on the asphalt.

About Piero she is also in doubt. He is good-looking and intense, but... He is wealthy and drives a creamy car with a high sheen, but... He seems well-adjusted and crazy about her. But when her mind, laughing, turns its head or a corner, there is always a “but” standing like a wall at the end of an alley. A dark thicket of pines through a wrought iron grill.

Vittoria’s golden hair, pale in black and white, dark eyes darting from a worried mask; Piero’s smooth, selecting fingers, eyes extensions of his wrapping arms and grasping hands.

They are as mysterious to each other as the church across the street from an apartment building. People descend in twilight, then the bus turns a corner. The camera tight on a glaring streetlight, the bulb so bright all else goes dark. The film is The Eclipse.

Poster for and description of the film "L'Eclisse" (The Eclipse) made for Swee[t]art magazine, Oct. 2006.