Par-dela les Nuages

Par-dela les Nuages (aka Beyond the Clouds) consists of four vignettes adapted from Antonioni's 1983 book, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director. The first one "Story of a Love Affair That Never Existed" is a tale of a relationship (Sastre and Rossi Stuart) that goes on for years without ever being consummated. In "The Girl, the Crime...," the narrator (Malkovich) finds himself drawn to a shopgirl (Marceau), who killed her father by stabbing him 12 times. The third story combines "The Wheel" about a man (Weller) caught between his wife (Ardant) and his mistress (Caselli), with "Don't Try To Find Me." It all ends where it began, a relationship that can't be consummated, in "This Body of Filth" (a phrase from the Life of St. Theresa), where a footloose young man (Perez) falls for a young lady (Jacob), who's about to enter a convent.

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1995 Venice Film Festival Notes:
Missing at the festival were John Malkovich, Vincent Perez, and Sophie Marceau, who stayed in Paris with her newborn son.

Extra showings of the film were added on Sunday because of huge demand for seats. Some people began lining up for tickets hours in advance. It received a standing ovation at each showing.

A 52-minute documentary called Making a Film for Me is to Live was shot on location by the director's wife, Enrica Fico Antonioni. She filmed the making of Beyond the Clouds to dispel doubts that Antonioni's only contribution was his name. It records the unsinkable spirit of an 83-year-old man, half-paralyzed and unable to speak, giving direction to his actors with hand gestures.

Film Production Notes:
Par-Dela had a difficult birth and there was some bitterness on Antonioni's part about Italian producers' lack of enthusiasm for his projects. A last minute funding hitch in November '94 almost caused the film to halt shooting, when Italian production company Istituto Luce pulled out after the national cinema agency withheld its 25 percent stake in the project. Private Italian backers came forward with the 3 billion lire needed. The project was 55-percent French funded, with the remaining 20 percent coming from Germany.

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Ryan Gilbey, Independent:
"Antonioni's camera moves elegantly in and out of these characters' lives, alighting on the pain and longing which they struggle to understand, and eloquently expressing those feelings through starkly beautiful compositions, or ghostly fades, or open space and silence. Only the linking scenes lack conviction, though that isn't to slight Wim Wenders, who directed them. The stories themselves have such an intangible, sensuous quality that the structure anchors them. A minor chink in a blindingly impressive suit of armor."

Stephen Holden, NY Times:
"There are moments of such astounding visual power in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Beyond the Clouds that you are all but transported through the screen to a place where the physical and emotional weather fuse into a palpable sadness... The impact of these stories is not in the words but in the way the mood, texture and the acting build each situation into a visually intense parable about the similarity of spiritual, erotic and aesthetic aspiration."

Quentin Curtis, Independent on Sunday:
"The stuff of cinematic genius...a masterpiece"

Tom Charity, Time Out:
"Entrancing Cinema"

Derek Malcolm, The Guardian:
"Superbly filmed...erotic"

Boston Phoenix:
Much of Beyond the Clouds reminds us that life is indeed a mist out of which we rarely emerge. At the beginning of the second episode, when Malkovich finds himself following Marceau through narrow, curving allées, Antonioni keeps hesitating, stopping to look at the foliage or listen to the birds. In the third episode, when Fanny Ardant is trying to rent Jean Reno's apartment, there's a moment, shot from overhead, when Reno vacates a leather easychair and the camera lingers on the chair as more interesting than Reno's character. The last segment, about a woman who wants to escape not just her body but her mundane thoughts, is pure Antonioni.

Jay Carr, Boston Globe:
"Because it likely will be Antonioni's swan song, and offers frame after frame of masterly beauty,
Beyond the Clouds must be seen."

Film Scouts:
"The maestro's new opus is a beautifully poetic but slightly cold reverie, a fragmented symphony of unquenched desires and seductive frustrations, a display of handsomely naked bodies under the nostalgic gaze of a man for whom youth is now a distant country, a mental journey from Ferrara under the fog to Aix-en-Provence at night through Portofino in the rain and a Paris all in greys."

Film Journal:
"One of the great pleasures of watching Beyond the Clouds is witnessing Antonioni (assisted by Wim Wenders, who shot some segments with John Malkovich) at work again, completing a film
indubitably his. The balletic movements of the actors and the carefully framed long shots of the
resort have his unmistakable stamp upon them. Strict and uncompromisingly brittle, Beyond the
Clouds makes another elegant reminder of the malaise of our times. But it also offers a note of
renewal, a tone that is new for Antonioni to strike."

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Click on above image to visit the DVD page of photos

CAST

John Malkovich........Narrator/Director
Kim Rossi Stuart........................Silvano
Sophie Marceau...........Young Woman
Vincent Perez.............................Niccolo
Jean Reno.............................. ........Carlo
Peter Weller...............................Roberto
Fanny Ardant.............................Patricia
Ines Sastre..................................Carmen
Chiara Caselli...................................Olga
Irene Jacob....................Young Woman
Marcello Mastroianni................Painter
Jeanne Moreau............................Friend

CREDITS

Directed by.....................Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay by................Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and Wim Wenders
Based on Antonioni's That Bowling Alley on the Tiber
Cinematography by........Alfio Contini
Music by.............Van Morrison, Lucio Dalla and Laurent Petitgand

Premiered internationally at the Venice Film Festival in September 3, 1995 winning the International Critics Prize.

Premiered in US at the AFI/L.A. Film Festival in November 1995

Featured at the New York Film Festival in September 1996

Film locations: Paris, France\Aix-en-Provence,
France\Portofino, Italy\Ferrara,
Italy

Click here for the Story Page with more photos.

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