Monica Vitti – Michelangelo Antonioni’s Muse
Monica Vitti, phot. by Bert Stern, 1966
She was the first star of Italian cinema who was able to convey the complexity of the female psyche on screen. Her phenomenon was not limited to her original beauty, but was the sum of subtle details that made Monica Vitti the essence of femininity itself – mysterious, fascinating, and complex.
Monica Vitti (born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli) was born in Rome in 1931. She came from a middle-class family, which gave her an impeccable upbringing and education. She wanted to get involved in theater at a fairly early age and appeared in her first plays as a teenager. She also honed her acting skills at the Roman Academy of Dramatic Arts. From the very beginning of her stage career, Monica Vitti was cast in serious works by authors such as Ionesco, Brecht, and Osborne.
The Italian actress also tried her hand at film, but the early 1950s were not conducive to her career. Italian cinema was undergoing a serious crisis at the time, and girls with expressive, even aggressive beauty, whose acting was supposed to reflect the bluntness and straightforwardness of Italian women, such as Sophia Loren, were popular. The turning point in Monica Vitti’s professional life came when she met Michelangelo Antonioni at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan. The actress and director became an inseparable couple in life and on stage.
Monica Vitti, star of existentialism
Monica Vitti in L’avventura
The first great and joint success of Vitti and Antonioni was the film „L’avventura” (1960). Monica Vitti played the young Claudia, who unexpectedly falls head over heels in love with the fiancé of her missing friend Anna. However, Sandro proves unworthy of pure and great love – he is merely a seeker of erotic experiences and betrays Claudia at the first opportunity. This romantic disappointment marks the heroine’s dramatic experience with triviality. Her boundless devotion to the man – physical and spiritual – is reduced by him to a mere “adventure” – one of many.
The role of Claudia brought Monica Vitti many awards, and Antonioni himself was hailed as a new phenomenon in cinema on a par with Ingmar Bergman. The actress also appeared in the director’s next film, “La Notte” (1961). Although she did not play the lead role here, the character of Valentina she created exudes even greater charm and acting maturity. Her character is no longer a naive girl, like Claudia in “L’Avventura”, but a woman who has a certain amount of experience behind her. Valentina has experienced unrequited love and knows what to expect from men. Nevertheless, albeit with great distance and distrust, she becomes entangled in an affair with the married writer Giovanni (played by Marcello Mastroianni).
„L’Eclisse” is a movie starring Monica Vitti, in which the actress plays Vittoria, a young translator searching for meaning in her life. The heroine of Eclipse, like the women mentioned above, is poignantly lonely. At the same time, however, she is fully aware that a relationship with a man will not be a remedy for this condition. Eclipse is a sad film about the failure of love in the modern world.
Monica Vitti and Alain Delon in “The Eclipse”
Antonioni’s fourth film with his beautiful muse, “Red Desert”, was in a similar vein. Here, Monica Vitti as Giuliana is a typical neurotic, with strong suicidal tendencies. She cannot find happiness in life because she desires total love. Meanwhile, the world with its harsh laws of consumerism makes it impossible for such a feeling to exist.
Monica Vitti – the Italian Garbo takes a new path
After appearing in the four films mentioned above, the actress gained the undisputed status of an existential cinema star. Her black outfit, rough voice, melancholic movements, and mood swings perfectly reflected the atmosphere of Sartre’s era. She was called “the Italian Greta Garbo.” John Russel Taylor described the magic of her character as follows:
“Something unforgettable that everyone takes away from the film is the character of Monica Vitti, the subtly outlined bones of her face, the thicket of her honey-blonde hair—photographed with love in slow close-ups capturing the beginnings of love, the pain of loss, the wildest joy of life, or the deepest despair. One could discuss at length and fruitlessly whether it is indeed Monica Vitti who expresses these emotions, or whether they flow from a complex whole in which the actress plays the role of a beautiful object imposed on her by the director (…) However, this is not really important: even if the director uses her as a non-actress, she has the necessary and difficult to define condition of being an effective non-actor – a palpable screen presence.
However, Vitti wanted a change, as she confessed in an interview: “I am tired of constantly being portrayed as a dreamy, subdued creature, tormented by moral and sexual problems. Antonioni’s enormous talent has nothing to do with this. I just want to laugh, entertain the audience, joke around, be a different Monica.”
Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise
The actress therefore began to successfully appear in comedies, such as “The Tortoise and the hare” or “The Troubled One”. The latter film was an excellent pastiche of contemporary Italian cinema, including Antonioni. She also starred in Roger Vadim’s film “Nutty, Naughty Chateau”. However, the truly groundbreaking work for Monica Vitti was “Modesty Blaise” (1966), a film adaptation of a popular British comic book.
The main character of the movie is a female version of James Bond. Her greatest asset is her gender and her characteristic accessories. The film features, for example, lipsticks with poison gas, poisoned combs, and dangerous powder compacts. However, these props are not purely for entertainment purposes. They become a symbol of femininity used as a weapon of attack or defense.
Monica Vitti and Italian comedy
The artistic separation of Monica Vitti and Antonioni sealed their breakup in real life. The actress then became involved with the famous cinematographer Carlo Di Palma. She also formed a screen duo with him. Di Palma directed one of the films in which she starred, “Teresa the Thief”.
After her breakup with Antonioni, Monica Vitti mainly played roles in Italian comedies, which were popular primarily in Italy itself. Her best performances from this period include those in “The Girl with a Pistol” (1968) by Maria Monicelli and “The Drama of Jealousy” (“The Pizza Triangle”) by Ettore Scola. Monica Vitti’s last truly great work was “The Phantom of Liberty” by Luis Buñuel himself in 1974.
What was Monica Vitti really like? She certainly created unforgettable characters in which she managed to highlight femininity not so much as a body, but as sensitivity and an eternal desire for love. The star herself described her personality very eloquently: “I am not exactly like in Antonioni’s films, nor like in later comedies. I am someone else. Fortunately.”
Monica Vitti died on February 2, 2022.