A three-part anthology film about love and sexuality: a menage-a-trois between a couple and a young woman on the coast of Tuscany; an advertising executive under enormous pressure at work, who, during visits to his psychiatrist, is pulled to delve into the possible reasons why his stress seems to manifest itself in a recurring erotic dream; and a story of unrequited love about a beautiful, 1960s high-end call girl in an impossible affair with her young tailor. –IMDb

Director

Wong Kar-wai

Born in Shanghai, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of five. Coming from the Mainland and speaking only Mandarin and Shanghainese, he had a difficult period of adjustment to Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, spending hours in movie theatres with his mother. He made his directing debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By, produced by Alan Tang. It was a crime melodrama of the kind then hugely popular, and with heavy borrowings from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1974), but already displayed one of his principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes expressionistic color palette. It is his only box office hit to date. Wong went on to direct several more feature films in the 1990s, among these were Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Ashes of Time (1994). His first major international recognition was at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for Happy Together (1997). The filming of In the Mood for Love (2000) had to be shifted from Beijing… read more

Steven Soderbergh

At the age of 26, Steven Soderbergh permanently altered the face of independent cinema when he became the youngest-ever winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival for sex, lies and videotape, his feature-film directorial debut. A simmering exploration of the nature of modern relationships and the links between sexuality and voyeurism, the film was an international sensation that established its director as one of the golden boys of world cinema. Born in Georgia on January 14, 1963, Soderbergh grew up in Baton Rouge, LA, where his father was the Dean of Louisiana State University’s College of Education. While still in high school, Soderbergh enrolled in the university’s film animation class and began making short 16 mm films with second-hand equipment. After he graduated from high school, he went to Hollywood, where he worked as a freelance editor. Soderbergh’s time in Hollywood was brief, and he soon returned home, where he continued making short films and writing scripts… read more

At the age of 26, Steven Soderbergh permanently altered the face of independent cinema when he became the youngest-ever winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival for sex, lies and videotape, his feature-film directorial debut. A simmering exploration of the nature of modern relationships and the links between sexuality and voyeurism, the film was an international sensation that established its director as one of the golden boys of world cinema. Born in Georgia on January 14, 1963, Soderbergh grew up in Baton Rouge, LA, where his father was the Dean of Louisiana State University’s College of Education. While still in high school, Soderbergh enrolled in the university’s film animation class and began making short 16 mm films with second-hand equipment. After he graduated from high school, he went to Hollywood, where he worked as a freelance editor. Soderbergh’s time in Hollywood was brief, and he soon returned home, where he continued making short films and writing scripts. One of his films, a documentary about the rock group Yes, earned him an assignment to direct a full-length concert film for the band. The finished product, 9012 Live, was nominated for a 1986 Grammy.

Following this achievement, Soderbergh filmed the short subject Winston, a study of sexual gamesmanship that he would expand into sex, lies and videotape. In the wake of the 1989 film’s great success, Soderbergh made Kafka, a darkly comic fictional account of the author’s life. The austere film turned out to be something of a disappointment, as did the modest King of the Hill, Soderbergh’s 1993 portrait of a young boy’s coming-of-age during the Depression. The Underneath, his 1995 film, was a post-noir crime drama that offered further existential meditation and an exploration of the destructive effects of sexuality: unfortunately, like Soderbergh’s previous two efforts, it remained mired in relative obscurity. The same could be said of Schizopolis and Gray’s Anatomy (both 1996), the former a loopy, inventive look at the intricacies of communication that Soderbergh termed an “artistic wake-up call” to himself, the latter a filmed performance of one of Spalding Gray’s monologues. In 1998, Soderbergh made good on his “wake-up call” with Out of Sight, his most critically and commercially successful film since sex, lies and videotape. Adapted from the novel by Elmore Leonard, it was an irreverent, enjoyable affair that remained true to the book’s spirit and featured believable chemistry between leads George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The following year, Soderbergh continued on his critical winning streak with The Limey, the generally well-received tale of an ex-con (Terence Stamp) bent on revenge for his daughter’s mysterious death. He earned even greater plaudits in 2000 as the director of Erin Brockovich; starring Julia Roberts as its eponymous secretary-heroine who uncovers a major environmental scandal, the film was enthusiastically embraced by audiences and critics alike.

Later that same year, Soderbergh raised the bar on issue-oriented drama with Traffic, a multi-layered, multi-character look at the United States’ “War on Drugs.” Easily Soderbergh’s most ambitious effort, the 50 million-dollar production boasted a seven-city shooting schedule with over 100 speaking parts; almost a third of which were spoken completely in Spanish. What’s more, the director insisted on serving as cinematographer for the primarily hand-held, naturally lit film. The gamble paid off, both critically and commercially. Soderbergh’s touch with actors yielded best-yet performances from Catherine Zeta-Jones, Miguel Ferrer, and Benicio Del Toro, the latter of whom walked away with a slew of year-end critics awards, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar. The film itself shared a berth with Brockovich when the Academy Awards nominations were announced, and Soderbergh made it into the history books as the first person to be doubly nominated for Best Director for two films that were also both nominated for Best Picture. When the winners were finally announced, Traffic earned four Oscars including a Best Director statue for Soderbergh; his work on Brockovich helped snag a long-awaited Best Actress Oscar for Roberts. Meanwhile, on the profits side, Traffic became the most successful film yet produced by USA, a company previously known for highly praised and little-seen mid-budget films.

Soderbergh then plunged headlong into two big-budget adaptations of classic films, both starring his Out of Sight muse George Clooney: 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven and 2002’s Solaris. The former, a star-laden update of 1960’s Rat Pack favorite, garnered favorable reviews and a box-office total of more than $180 million, the director’s biggest take yet. The latter marked Soderbergh’s return to screenwriting: Encouraged by producer James Cameron to adapt Stanislaw Lem’s philosophical sci-fi short story, Soderbergh also signed on to direct in the wake of his 2000 Oscar win. Rather than tamper with director Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1972 adaptation of Solaris, Soderbergh promised his version would be closer in spirit to the source material. Despite an economical editing job and generally-encouraging reviews, Solaris proved baffling to audiences, who let the moody, psychological sci-fi film die a quick death. Between these high-profile projects, the director even managed to sandwich in a $2 million ensemble piece, shot mostly on digital video in less than three weeks. 2002’s Full Frontal reunited him for the third time with Julia Roberts, but Soderbergh’s grungy, esoteric take on the discord between movie life and “real” life was generally reviled by critics and completely ignored at the box office. The director would retreat to safer waters in 2004 with the successful sequel Ocean’s Twelve, a more self-reflexive, globe-trotting take on the first film that reunited most of the original cast.

A string of almost deliberately obscure work followed. On HBO, Soderbergh and Clooney satisfied their political leanings with K Street, a gritty, fly-on-the-wall soap that attempted to meld fiction with documentary as it charted the lives of two high-powered lobbyists. The drab Midwestern anti-thriller Bubble boasted a unique releasing scheme, in which it premiered on pay-per-view cable, in art-house theaters and on DVD at the same time in early 2006. Critical notices for the shot-on-video, non-professionally cast film were positive if not overwhelmingly so, and Bubble saw brisker business on DVD than it might have otherwise. A less-happy fate befell The Good German later that year. A considerably higher-budgeted tale of romantic intrigue set in post-WWII Berlin starring Clooney and Cate Blanchett, the material called to mind Casablanca, The Third Man and other wartime noirs so strongly, Soderbergh decided to shoot the film using cameras and techniques from its era. The resulting black-and-white prestige pic divided critics who found it either enthrallingly retro or needlessly opaque and austere; whatever their opinions, the film failed to catch on with audiences after a meager awards-season release from Warner Bros. Once again, Soderbergh licked his wounds by providing the company with another installment of its profitable Ocean’s franchise in summer 2007. In addition to his directorial work, Soderbergh has also served as a producer and screenwriter for other directors’ projects; he first made major headway into the world of producing when he and Clooney opened up an exclusive, first-look deal to develop projects under the shingle Section Eight in late 2001. Among Section Eight’s first endeavors were pictures helmed by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), and Christopher Nolan (Insomnia); though the shingle rarely produced runaway hits, through it, Soderbergh was able to show support for micro-budgeted debuts not unlike his own. —allmovie guide

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Michelangelo Antonioni

Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni redefined the concept of narrative cinema, challenging the accepted notions at the heart of storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large; his films – a seminal body of enigmatic and intricate mood pieces – rejected action in favor of contemplation, championing image and design over character and story. Haunted by a sense of instability and impermanence, his work defined a cinema of possibilities, a shifting landscape of thoughts and ideas devoid of resolution; in Antonioni’s world, riddles were not answered, but simply evaporated into other riddles.

Antonioni was born on September 29, 1912, in Ferrara, Italy; as a child, his interests included painting and building architectural models (an interest which continued in the design and decor of his films). After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Bologna, where he initially studied classics but later emerged with a degree in economics. While he was at college… read more

Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni redefined the concept of narrative cinema, challenging the accepted notions at the heart of storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large; his films – a seminal body of enigmatic and intricate mood pieces – rejected action in favor of contemplation, championing image and design over character and story. Haunted by a sense of instability and impermanence, his work defined a cinema of possibilities, a shifting landscape of thoughts and ideas devoid of resolution; in Antonioni’s world, riddles were not answered, but simply evaporated into other riddles.

Antonioni was born on September 29, 1912, in Ferrara, Italy; as a child, his interests included painting and building architectural models (an interest which continued in the design and decor of his films). After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Bologna, where he initially studied classics but later emerged with a degree in economics. While he was at college, his interest in the theater blossomed, and he also began writing short fiction and film reviews for a local newspaper, Il Corriere Padano, often running afoul of the motion-picture community for his savage attacks on the mainstream Italian comedies of the 1930s. Antonioni’s initial attempt at filmmaking was a documentary profiling a nearby insane asylum; the project was aborted because the inmates would lapse into fits of panic each time the lights of the camera were turned on.

By 1939, Antonioni had chosen the cinema as his life’s work, and he soon relocated to Rome, where he accepted a position at Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. After being dismissed over a political disagreement, Antonioni enrolled at the Centre Sperimentale to study film technique. By age 30, he was working professionally in the film industry; his first screenplay went unproduced, but he was soon hired to co-write Roberto Rossellini’s Un Pilota Ritorna, followed by a stint as the assistant director to Enrico Fulchignoni on I Due Foscari. In 1942, Antonioni traveled to France to work with Marcel Carné on Les Visiteurs du Soir. Antonioni was soon called back to Italy for military service, where he managed to wrangle funding from the Luce Institute for Gente del Po, a documentary portrait of the impoverished lives of the fishermen along the Po River.

The Allied invasion of Italy brought film production there to an end for some time, forcing Antonioni to earn his living as a book translator; he also wrote prolifically for a number of magazines, including Film Rivista and Film d’Oggi. Additionally, he was commissioned by Luchino Visconti to write a pair of screenplays, Furore and The Trial of Maria Tarnowska, neither of which was ever produced. Finally, in 1948, Antonioni was able to return behind the camera, and over the course of the next two years he directed no less than six documentary shorts; among them, Nettezza Urbana, L’Amorosa Menzogna, and Superstizione hinted most strongly at the work still to come, their style of photography Spartan and unadorned, forgoing strong contrasts to focus on the middle range of gray tones.

After completing the short subject La Villa dei Mostri, Antonioni was able to secure financing for his 1950 feature debut, Cronaca di un Amore. Here he turned away from the neorealism so much in vogue, employing professional actors and focusing on interpersonal relationships instead of social criticism. More importantly, the film further developed his increasingly unique visual aesthetic, honing a rigorously disciplined brand of “anti-cinema,” favoring long, deep-focus shots in opposition not only to the gritty, newsreel-like feel of the neorealists but even the montage dynamic perfected by Sergei Eisenstein. With Cronaca di un Amore, Antonioni first moved into a realm of film previously explored only by the likes of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, a form of interior cinema concerned far less with the body than with the soul, and less by the actual arc of his plot than by the characters’ reactions to it. Rather inexplicably, Cronaca di un Amore made next to no impact upon its original release, and Antonioni spent the remainder of the decade in relative obscurity.

In 1952, he collaborated with Federico Fellini on the script to Lo Sceicco Bianco, followed by a directing assignment helming an episode of the triptych I Vinti. Antonioni did not mount another feature-length project until 1953 with La Signora Senza Camelie, an essay on the world of show business which further developed the formula of internalized action. Yet again, the film received virtually no notice, and was barely even screened outside of Italy; Antonioni spent the next several years in relative seclusion, directing only a segment of L’Amore in Città as well as Uomini in Piú, a documentary commissioned by an international committee studying overpopulation.

Finally, in 1955 he was able to mount his third feature, Le Amiche. Though beset by troubles from the outset – financing even ran out halfway through the production, suspending the shooting schedule for several months – the completed film was Antonioni’s most mature to date. Based loosely on the Cesare Pavese novella Tra Donne Sole, it further rejected all notions of traditional narrative and literary value, even garnering some degree of attention from the international cinema community. Il Grido followed in 1957, and in 1958 Antonioni resurfaced with a pair of films, La Tempesta and Nel Segno di Roma. The period was one largely defined by artistic and commercial disappointment, and of the three films, the director allowed his name to remain on Il Grido alone.

In 1960, Antonioni’s masterpiece L’Avventura premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His most extreme work to date, as a study of alienation among the bourgeoisie, it progressed at a snail’s pace, its long, beautiful shots telling virtually no story whatsoever. Even the basic plot – the search for a missing woman – willfully disintegrated at the end, prompting a near-riot among Cannes viewers. Ultimately, L’Avventura won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize, becoming a phenomenal success across the globe. Antonioni became a major figure in international cinema virtually overnight, and his lead actress, Monica Vitti – a luminous cipher perfectly suited to her director’s austere formalism – emerged as a huge star.

La Notte – the second film in the trilogy begun with L’Avventura – appeared in 1961, exploring the existential ground of alienation, non-communication, and meaninglessness. A transitional work also starring Vitti as well as Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, La Notte experimented more freely with editing techniques, relying less on the long, expansive takes which defined Antonioni’s earlier work. The 1962 release L’Eclisse reduced its plot structure to the barest minimum, replacing narrative with an acute psychological portrait of a woman (Vitti) who drifts from one romantic liaison into another. Il Deserto Rosso, his fourth and final film starring Vitti – as well as his first color feature – followed in 1964.

In 1966, Antonioni went to England to shoot Blow-Up, his most commercially successful effort. Set in the “Swinging London” scene of the mid-‘60s, it starred David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who accidentally photographs a murder. The wide popularity of Blow-Up brought Antonioni to America, where in 1970 he made his lone U.S. feature, Zabriskie Point. Chung Kuo/Cina, a four-hour television documentary filmed in China and subsequently denounced by the nation’s government, followed in 1972. The Passenger, a thriller shot in North Africa starring Jack Nicholson, appeared three years later, while Il Mistero di Oberwald did not bow until 1980.

With 1982’s Identificazione di una Donna, Antonioni’s career largely ground to a halt; a savage early review by New York Times critic Vincent Canby prompted the film’s U.S. distributor to drop the film, and due to the loss of potential revenue, Antonioni was unable to realize several planned projects. A 1985 stroke left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, but a decade later Antonioni returned to filmmaking with Par-Dela les Nuages (Beyond the Clouds), a feature co-directed by Wim Wenders.

It would be nearly another ten years before Antonioni stepped behind the camera again, but in 2004, at the age of 91, he involved himself with two new projects. The first film, Michelangelo Eye to Eye was a 35-minute documentary, while Eros featured multiple segments directed by such auteurs as Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong Kar-Wai. In 1995, Antonioni received an honorary Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. He passed away at the age of 94 on July 30, 2007, in Rome. —AllMovie guide

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