Beyond the Clouds

The eighty-three-year-old Antonioni returned to filmmaking after a ten-year absence (triggered by a debilitating stroke that left him unable to speak) with this resolutely idiosyncratic treatise on that most old-fashioned of themes: beauty. Its four separate episodes, set in France and Italy, are based on stories in Antonioni’s collection That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director. Stars such as Irène Jacob, Peter Weller, and Jean Reno all engage in narratives of love, its unattainability and its lure. Framing segments, directed by coproducer Wim Wenders and starring John Malkovich as The Director, link the tales, as does a whimsical ronde reuniting Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. The film was poorly received when it debuted in the mid-nineties, when being “against beauty” was all the rage, but its stunning images and unabashed embrace of eros and emotion now stand ripe for rediscovery. “The work of a great director,” Peter Hogue wrote in Film Comment, “and one of the major films of the decade.”