Had I not been watching it as part of my Antonioni perspective, I would never have guessed that "Il Misterio de Oberwald" (The Mystery of Oberwald, 1980) was made by Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007). For starters, it is set in some pre-World War I quasi-Hapsburg past. And it is based on a play, so that there is lots of verbiage. And the play, ("L'Aigle a Deux Têtes" --the eagle with two heads being the symbol of the Hapsburg monarchs) was a fairy tale romantic confection written by Jean Cocteau. Before watching the movie, I said that I couldn't imagine a blend of Antonioni austerity and alienation with Cocteau's magical irrealism and romanticism. Having seen it, I can say that the result is a movie hostile to the spirit of Cocteau that moves ponderously and doesn't go anywhere.

Many Antonioni films (and no Cocteau ones) have been accused of being slow-paced, and both Antonioni and Cocteau stylized portrayals of doomed romances. The sets and costumes in "Il Misterio de Oberwald" are drab. The affect of the actors is high for an Antonioni film, below average for Cocteau.

What interested Antonioni was shooting on video (which was not yet established then) and manipulating the colors. The man who had the grass painted in "Il deserto rosso" is recognizable the same one who wanted the preternatural green forest in "Misterio." Some occasional ghost doubles would seem more Cocteau than Antonioni. And the tinting of many scenes seems like a reach back to some silent films -- except much uglier. Cocteau never shot a film in color, though I can imagine him being interested in playing with color -- and even the changing color filtering of shots of flora, but not the ugly monochromatic tinting of interiors in the cast at Oberwald.

Antonioni veteran Monica Vitti he queen of the unnamed Ruritanian country has arrived at the start of the movie to dine alone with the portrait of the king who was assassinated on their wedding day. We learn that she flits from castle to castle (and is building a very expensive new one) while the Archduchess, her mother-in-law, runs the country in cahoots with the Count of Foehn (Paolo Bonacelli), who is also the chief of police of the kingdom.

The queen's chat with a large portrait of the dead king is interrupted by someone who looks quite like him bursting into the room. He is bleeding and dazed. The queen hides him and is told (in a lengthy expository) speech that a poet was seen on the castle grounds en route to assassinate the queen.

After the courtier leaves, and the queen provides the poet-assassin (a very Cocteau notion!) a bandage, she welcomes him as her Death and Reunion with her dead husband. This puts him off his task. Not that he says anything. The queen rattles on enough for two. The bottom line is that she will protect him for three days. If he has not killed her, she will turn him over to be executed.

Can Love be far behind Meeting -Cute? No. There is an astoundingly mawkish ending two hours into the movie. It boggles my mind that Antonioni could have shot it so tritely (though having thunder on the word "death" early on shows that in this outing he was not averse to the cheapest of cheesy effects!).

I thought that Vitti and the pale-eyed, raven-tressed, cleft-chin Franco Branciaroli as the poet-assassin (Sebastian) were fine, though clumsily and tritely blocked. Paolo Bonacelli came across as too reasonable (an insufficiently sinister villain) and Elisabetta Pozzi (as the queen's reader, Edith de Berg) did not come across at all. As the queen's champion, commander of the Royal Guard, Luigi Diberti seemed rather nebbish too, though his beard was remarkably manicured.

Antonioni supervised a transfer from videotape to 35mm film stock and his master was used for the transfer (back) to videotape -- which looks very 1980-bad-television-costume drama with weird color manipulation... and sound that is uneven. If Antonioni was seeking to entertain, he failed. His experiments in color-filtering manipulation also failed IMO.

Most of the movie takes place in one very stage-set-looking room of the castle. The only scene I found visually interesting was a helicopter shot of the queen riding a white horse. The subject matter of that did not seem Antonioni-like, but bravura outdoor compositions are an Antonioni trademark. Alas, that was less than two minutes of respite from the talky, stagy movie.

BTW, the box lists the running time as 129 minutes. Mercifully, it runs four minutes less than that, though still takes more than two hours. And two hours could easily be better spent on many things, including any of the earlier Antonioni films that are available on DVD.

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© 2008, Stephen O. Murray


The rest of my own Antonioni retrospective to date:
Cronaca di una amore (1950)
L'amíche (1955)
Il Grido (1958),
L'Aventtura (1960)
La Notte (1961)
L'eclisse (1962),
Il derserto ross (Red Desert, 1964),
Blow-Up (1966),
The Passenger (1975)
and his disappointing contribution to the trilogy Eros (2004, but see the bonus feature on it of Antonioni and an earlier Michelangelo!)





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