Why so much hype?

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

There is so much in this film that it is hard to know where to start. To sum up the film quickly is very difficult, but it is a heavily philosophical movie about relationships, love, and interaction in the world. It is focused around the thoughts of a director who wonders around southern Europe thinking about his new films and conjuring up stories of the lives of the people around him. The movie is divided into four stories, all about sexual relationships, and these stories are conjured up in the mind of the director. There is a lot of nudity and sex in this movie, but I would hardly say that it is pornographic. In fact this is hardly related to any American movie. Americans are either very blatant or subtle with their on-screen nudity and it works primarily on the rating system. A movie wanting to attract more people will use subtle nudity, while a more expicit movie will receive a higher rating. In the past few years, nudity has become somewhat scare in American movies, as it generally attracts the undesirable R (or in America X) rating, which means not as many people see it, and thus not as much money is made. Back in the eighties though, nudity, or simply show bare breasts and bare bottoms, was the realm of the sex-romp comedy and was simply showed because the movie was a trashy comedy. I even remember a movie called SOB which the entire plot was the main character working up her courage to flash her bare beasts in front of the camera. Beyond the Clouds is far beyond any of that. First, the Continental Europeans are far less subtle than the Americans when it comes to nudity. In fact, they see it more as an artistic expression than something for desperate men to jerk off to. When we consider such things in this movie, we don't look at it as being lust inspiring trashy pornography, but rather as a sensual exotic expression of sex and the relationship between people. We don't look at the naked body as something to lust over, but rather as a beautiful creation that should be admired. If we watch the movie to see naked women and bare breasts, then we will be sorely disappointed, because the bare breasts are not all that big. This is what I realised after watching this movie. The difference between a trashy American movie designed to arose horny men, and a sensual French movie that explores the beauty, and the pain, of sexual relations, is that in the trashy movies, the breasts are big, while here it is not at all important. As I have said previously, the theme of this movie is the exploration of sexual relationships, and there are four of them that will be examined in this movie. The first occurs in Italy after a man arrives at a hotel and meets a young Italian woman. They are attracted to each other but don't seem to be able to get close. In the first meeting they walk and talk, and kiss, but then they separate and go to their separate rooms. She waits up all night waiting for him to come, while he lies in his room, not really sure what he should do, and ends up falling asleep. As we watch her undress in her room, we soon realise that she wants him to come over so that they can make love, but that never happens. This scene is quite sensual, but we do not see that much of her body, only a glimpse as she removes her shirt and puts on her night-gown. Three years later they meet again, and once again walk and talk. Back at her apartment, they begin to talk about how one can never fully remove their past, and relates it to dregs in a coffee cup. They claim to be passionately in love, but he knows that she has not kept herself pure for him. Finally she has to admit that she has had a man living with her, but he left for somebody else. They struggle to try to get close, he leaves, and then comes back. The closest they come to making love here is as she lies on her bed, naked except for her panties, and he moves his hand over her body. It is very sensual, but it key is that he never touches her. It is as if he cannot touch her. They try to kiss, but they cannot touch. Then he leaves her, never to see her again. To me it seems like they are two people lost in the world and separated from humanity, only seeing each other. Yet her betrayal of him by taking another man haunts him and he cannot bring himself to touch her. The first time they met, they were able to kiss, but now they cannot. It is as if at first they were to become one, but now that she has been with somebody else, that can no longer happen. This also seems to be an expression of how we can never really come close to each other, that we will always be separated by an invisible barrier that we cannot force our way through. The second one brings the director into the scene as he follows a girl around who admits to being a murderer. They make love, and then he leaves, realising that he has become a part of something that he shouldn't. Once again they meet later, but he completely ignores her. As he follows her around, he watches her but doesn't speak. She tries to speak to him, but he is silent, just standing there are watching. He tells us earlier that as a director he found himself separated from the world, but has brought himself back into the world through the use of images, and it is the images that is what keeps him there. This suggests that he sees this woman as an image of beauty, and is so captivated by her that he brings himself into the world and partake in its pleasures. They passionately make love, and then he realises that he has trespassed in a realm that he is supposed to be detached from, and walks away. This has left her wanting, and she follows him, only to find him ignoring her, once again detaching himself from the world that he views from afar. It is interesting to see that in this movie, a lot of the people are trying to get away. Before we see him on the train, there is an image of a man dragging a woman away from the tracks, and once the train has passed she runs towards it again, trying to get away from him. This comes after the third piece in which a woman approaches a man and tells him a story of how Aztec porters were helping some scientists carry equipment to an archeological site. They suddenly stop for an hour, and then continue. When asked why, they say that they were travelling too fast and had to wait for their souls to catch up. This is a start of an extra-marital affair. This one is probably the harshest, because the man is a decietful liar, trying to placate his wife and his lover. He is rough and violent, forcing both woman to have sex with him, and claiming to them that he has left the other. The most vivid scene is where he rips the dress off of his lover and begins to kiss her belly, giving as the impression that she is his possession to do with what he wills. In essence, this woman is a bright and philosophical woman, who attached herself to a man, and the woman who was wanting to slow down her life to appreciate it, has not fallen into the grasps of a man that has claimed her as his own, yet not willing to be exclusively hers. His wife though ends up walking out, and here she meets a man whose wife has just walked out. In a way both of them have been rejected by their partners for others. She is an emotional woman, wanting the carress of a loving man, while he cold and emotionless, wanting to hide in his business to escape from the pain of his life. As he enters the elevator to his flat, a woman enters and tries to talk to him, but he simply shuts her out because he no longer wants to get close to somebody. As the scene draws to an end, these two caress, knowing that in essence their pain is the same and together they can over come the hurt. On the other hand, they are both rejected, and are dumped together as nobody else really wants them. The final one is the most philosophical. A woman rushes out of a building and a man runs to catch up with her and tries to talk we her, but she continues to try to get away. They talk, and we learn that they are opposite. One fears death and wants to enjoy life, while the other fears life and wishes to detach herself from him. He tries hard to get close to her, but she refuses to let him do this. We do not know why this happens, but we know that she no longer wants to be with this guy, and in the end tells him that she is going to join a covenant. He wonders off, and we wait to see if she calls him back, but he silently walks off up the street, and we never see her again. How does this all link together. Well, even though all of the characters are different, it seems that the central factor is that there are two focused characters. The woman seem to change from being very forward to incredibly chaste, while the men go from being chaste to be incredibly forward. In the first one, the woman is waiting for him, and even removes her clothes, but the man will not touch her. The second she is a little less willing, but he is wanting to draw closer to her, and they finally come together. The third they are both forward, but the man becomes forceful, by ripping off her clothes, while she is a little hesitant and wanting promises from him, while the forth, he is actively chasing her, and she is actively running away, and neither of them undress. If we interpose the characters together we can see how the woman is progressively hurt by the men, she draws herself away from them, finally locking herself in a covenant, while as the man continues to succeed, he becomes more forceful and aggressive. In essence both change each other, the woman, in her seductive ways, draws the man closer to her, making him more confident in his actions, and as the man becomes more confident he begins to ignore the woman's protestations and begins to scare her and she tries to flee. As such, it shows a world were the relationships are never quite meet up, as they are never able to actually meet at the same spot and have a mutual respect for each other. It also suggests that it is the woman that create

While it got much better towards the end (better acting, image composition and both tonal and chromatic contrast), i can say that Beyond the Clouds made me say this : "i don't like Antonioni". I may be an ignorant, but please give me the benefit of a doubt about this film. The beginning is absurd (as are situations throughout the whole movie). It seems that everybody does more thinking than feeling ("What if i told you i fell in love with you?" to which the reply comes pretty fast "it is like lighting a candle in an already lightened room". Seriously. Would you say that if you were told this? It's not that i don't believe that two complete strangers could fall madly in love, but .. it happens so seldom that they bring proof to the saying "it only happens in movies" or better yet "in Antonioni's movie".We see character connections we don't need (like the girl from the cinema and the hotel manager looking suspiciously - camera zoom on the face- at the new client) and all in all, the movie is filled with intricacies that aren't necessary, making it like a fully lit Christmas-time shop window, out of which you like everything, but you wouldn't buy it all even if you could.All thanks on the camera movement - steadycam i suppose, crane, aso aso, but i would like to point out that we don't need to see the DOP's height when filming actors that are shorter/taller than him/her.As a final conclusion, the stiffness of the dialogs, the slow pacing of the editing, the (deliberate?) "year 1 at film academy" errors like jumping over the ax between the characters or filming the airplane's left wing and presenting it as a subjective image for the character sitting on the right side of the plane seem ridiculous and make me give this movie a 6 out of 10.

Beyond The Clouds is a hauntingly beautiful, elegiac work of art. The overall softness of the light that this movie is bathed in, makes you want to touch the screen. The autumnal mood conjured up could only been achieved by a director who has seen many summers of experience. Or, to put it another way, an old man. I know of no other movie that captures and uses the softness of light and seasonal mood with such ravishing quality as Beyond The Clouds. Nearly all the people in this film are beautiful, unless your idea of a beautiful woman is a pneumatic blond bimbo, that is. The dialogue doesn't really matter too much, not that there is much of it anyway, and as for storylines, forget it. Some films exist just as visual experiences, this is one of them. Don't bother if you want "simple entertainment",this not for you. I could enthuse about the visual perfection of this movie for days, but I won't. If you are at all interested in cinematography, photography, film direction etc., watch this film.

"Beyond the Clouds" is an over-the-top artsy group of four vignettes each a offering a glimpse into a man-woman relationship from the tenuous to the turbulent. Although the film offers superb cinematography, some exquisite visual beauty, and a cast of fine performers, there's little meat on the bones of this fragmented work. A taste of a relationship cannot impart the fullness of it and synergism suggests that much more can be accomplished with one story in 2 hours than with four. Nonetheless, "Beyond the Clouds" will be fodder for dilettantes and a visual feast for the all albeit superficial, stilted, and lacking in substance.