Eclipse. A mess of burnt-out butts. A young man (Francisco Rabal) and a young woman (Monica Vitti) sit looking at them, at what is left of their relationship. ''I tried to make you happy," he says hopelessly, and hopelessly she replies: "You did not succeed." Why not? What was missing in their lives? What do people need in order to be happy? In this gloomy little masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni does not try to answer such questions. He simply shows how one young woman tried to answer them—and failed. He tells the story of a luteless Orpheus and a promiscuous Eurydice who don't even know they're in hell.
When the young woman leaves her lover she wanders uneasily through the instant suburbs of Rome, through the temporary town that is rapidly burying the Eternal City, through the symbols of a dead past and a lifeless present. In despair she retreats into fantasies of flight from a world where money talks so loud that the heart cannot be heard. She greasepaints her body and makes like a Mau Mau; she goes for a plane ride and imagines she's a bird. But the paint washes off and the wings of fancy moult. The world is still there. She decides to make terms with it. But in gaining the world, will she lose her own soul?
One day at the stock exchange, in the temple of commercial civilization, she meets a handsome young broker (Alain Delon) with a mind like a ledger and a ticker for a heart, a man to whom all values are convertible in gold. He changes women the way he changes ties, and one day she happens to match his socks. "When I'm with you," she muses after the fact, "I feel as if I'm in a foreign country. But perhaps there's no need to know each other in order to love. Perhaps there's no need to love . . ."
No need to love? The camera wonders as it wanders through the city. Change and decay, Antonioni seems to say, in all around I see. A nurse wheels a baby carriage down a street. An old man watches it with haunted eyes. Headlines threaten atomic destruction. Water leaks from a barrel, runs into a sewer and is seen no more. In a park a fountain suddenly fails. The day fails. In the darkness a single street lamp burns, far away and cold. Then suddenly the lamp burns in the center of the screen, immense and pulsing, urgent, the light of life, the only life a human being has and will ever have. It goes off. The End.