The Ending (Spoilers)
So, did neither of them turn up at the end? Or did they meet but the film had moved on by that point and didn't show it? Does it matter?
shareCog,
I think the short answer is that the ending is an open one. At least in terms of the specific question regarding Vittoria and Piero. But your last question I think is the most important one, on two levels.
Regarding the two main characters, and in the context of the narrative, I think there is reason to believe they are not suited for each other despite whatever physical attraction they may have for each other. Vittoria is suspicious of too much emphasis on materialism, while Piero is unashamedly acquisitive and a striver. It is more than that, but it is that.
On the existential level, and regarding the thematic concerns of the film, I think the answer is that it doesn't matter what happens to the couple in the sense that whether they meet or not is something that is a matter of indifference to that which the film focuses on - the people shown coming and going, the places, the spaces, where they had been before, are untouched and unconcerned about the question.
One could aee this as a sort of nihilistic view, but my take is different. Whatever meaning we find in our own lives, the larger reality is that the environment around us and even most other people are indifferent. The message is do not look to the conclusion of some narrative as where and how you will find meaning.
Excellent analysis by kenny-164.
The reason I asked the question is because in most pieces I read about the film the sense seems to be that we are witnessing a missed appointment, which is very likely what is literally happening but I always feel like while this is probably true it also feels as though the film itself is moving on. In other words, at the end the focus is not ultimately upon the two main protagonists and their missed appointment but briefly on the other characters we see, which ties in to the previous post about a larger reality.
ogrady,
Yes, I think so. The indifference of the larger reality.
A discussion on a different thread takes up the thematic purpose of the interlude at the airport in Verona. On the surface level this whole section is rather confounding. Vittoria joins in a plane ride to Verona for a purpose (helping sell the plane) that is of no significance to her. It does not advance her plot, if you will. While there she looks around, one might say aimlessly. One group of two men speak American English to each other. What do they say? It doesn't really matter. Two black men (echoing i think the evening of African drums etc... earlier) lean against the wall, saying nothing. A bar inside, a bartender and customer, music playing on presumably a jukebox - what is this all about?
We experience this visit through Vittoria, and in asking what is going on?, we are subconsciously seeing in this interlude the way people find meaning, or not, in encounters with "the larger reality". The conversations the two Americans have is relevant to them, but what about Vittoria, or us? Even if we decide the Verona visit has no narrative connection to the central thread of Vittoria and Piero, what is its thematic purpose?
The larger reality you refer to for Antonioni includes specific visual references, such as while in Verona a brief look up at planes flying in apparent tandem overhead, and in the ending by the camera panning up to the sky, in one shot a man pointing out something distant to a woman companion from a rooftop.
I think Vittoria's experience of a lack of meaning, or more accurately a lack of compelling and direct meaning, in her Verona visit does two things. One is it reminds us that life does not unfold in a kind of dialectic progression, where each momnent builds more meaning upon those which have preceded. In fact much of what we experience feels very much to the contrary. How did the trip to Verona advance the narrative? It really did not in terms of the narrative, instead its inclusion and purpose is thematic.
The second is we nonetheless find meaning, but how we ASSIGN meaning is not direct and obvious.
So, I think the Verona visit foreshadows the film's ending. Vittoria's consideration whether what happens in such visit is "relevant" to her is echoed by the indifference of those people and places shown in the ending to the "question" of Vittoria and Piero. To be sure this does not mean that there is no meaning, or that indifference is the natural state - it does not mean that alienation is constant, and necessary.
Instead I think L'eclisse is an exercise showing how our search for meaning, especially in being with others to use Heidegger's term, takes place against a larger reality of others, and certainly of material reality, that has indifference as its basic if not exclusive nature.