Symbols

THE MOST INSISTENT presence in Marcc Bellocchio's Leap Into the Void is the director himself. He is almost tangibly there in the background of each heavily symbolic scene, shaking a first at reality. All too often, however, one also suspects that he is biting his thumb at the audience. It is not that he refuses to communicate. The themes--madness and sanity, meaning versus nihilism--present themselves at every turn. It's just that their hammering symbolism and anti-realism become tedious after a while. The director, it seems, is almost coercing one to interpret first, watch later. But unless one is prepared to keep a running tally of symbols, the piece is destined--indeed, determined--to remain little more than an enginia wrapped in a metaphor.

On a concrete level, the plot introduces Mauro Ponticelli (Michael Piccoli), and his sister Marta (Anouk Aimee). The former is a magistrate, the latter a lunatic. At first the separation is quite clear. Save for the disturbances created by his sister. Ponticelli is almost fanatically calm, all that a middle-aged magistrate should be. Aimee's Marta, by contrast, seems in each well-groomed motion to bristle with exposed nerve-endings.

"If she cries, how can I laugh?" muses Mauro. "After her menopause, maybe." The brother's and sister's confrontations are at once amusing and pathetic in their pettiness. In one scene, as Mauro types. Marta in the kitchen drums her fingers to the rhythm of the keys. Little by little her motions become agitated, then furious, as she takes a slab of frozen beef and hammers it against the counter in senseless anger.

Mauro does not remain impervious. "If only the insane would keep quiet," he sighs, repeatedly overhearing the muffled curses that stream through Marta's door. Doors and locks soon emerge as a motif--Mauro is endlessly closing doors, turning the key in the four locks of his front door, inspecting the locks on telephones. The physical boundaries manifest his compulsion to separate all that is sane from the insane, the acceptable from the shocking, and the inside from the outside.

It becomes progressively more difficult, however, even to determine which side of the line he occupies. Distinctions blur. The magistrate flies into hysterics on learning that Marta allowed the maid's son to touch his Mickey Mouse collection.

MEANWHILE, the movie drifts toward abstraction. The director leads Mauro through surreal landscapes to emphasize the psychological confusion--buildings, yards, and even acquaintances are presented in a manner so stylized that mere vestiges of reality remain. It drifts further: Battalions of ghost-like children in night-gowns prance beneath the ancestral portraits of the venerable Ponticelli apartment. A frosty window frames a child, wild-eyed, endlessly hammering discords out of a tinny piano.

The symbolic scenes are generally purely so, with no link to existence within the major plot. Action and dialogue on the surface tend to seem pedantic, existing for thematic purpose alone and turning the film into a nihilist morality play. When Mauro has to interrogate Giovanni, a young man who is suspected of having convinced a former mistress to jump out of a window, the legal paraphernalia inevitably gives way to philosophical probing. "Why was I born?". "What is the meaning of life?" Obsessed with such questions, Mauro begins to ponder convincing Marta to commit suicide. The acquaintance with the young man finishes off Mauro's already rickety defenses against the incursions of madness: If life makes no sense in itself, what can distinctions of sanity or public virtue matter?

Some scenes have the bizarre beauty of surrealist painting, and all are skillfully crafted. The final glimpse, in which the 'symbolic children,' donning bowler hats and other adult clothes prance to a sentimental tune played on the familiar piano, haunts as a danse macabre. But even if a metaphor superimposed upon another should create an interesting metaphor for the ever-central void, the concept cannot sustain interest for all that long. Whatever its merits, the piece is likelier to clicit a perturbed yawn than a leap of any sort.