Film: La Notte
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: Italy
Released: January 1961
Runtime: 122 minutes
Genre: Drama
Studio: Nepi Film
Influenced: Bernardo Bertolucci, Stanley Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, Claire Denis
My overriding image of 1960s Italian film is Marcello Mastroianni wondering around Italian cities looking troubled and confused by the modern world. Both Fellini and Antonioni obviously saw in him the embodiment of the existential angst of modern man, set within the context of the cities of Rome (La Dolce Vita) and Milan (La Notte). Fellini and Antonioni are my favourite Italian directors of the post-war period, Antonioni the more controlled and cerebral of the two. Antonioni also started out in the neorealist film tradition (with documentary shorts like 1947's Gente del Po), and then had success with various films in the 50s including Il Grido (1957), but is now best remembered for his trilogy (I would say tetralogy, including 1964's Il Deserto Rosso) of films in the early 1960s about alienation.
All of them are fine films and L'Avventura (1960) is often the most critically acclaimed, not least because it was the first film to establish Antonioni's signature style of precise visual compositions and open-ended narratives. I studied L'Avventura at university and it was the strangest film I'd seen up until that point, with the unexplained disappearance of a woman on a boat trip making me reconsider what cinema is actually about. L'Eclisse (1962) and Il Deserto Rosso are similarly mesmerising and mysterious, but for me La Notte is the most visually stunning (its black & white cinematography is arguably unparalleled) and most daring of the four films. Seemingly inspired by Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1954), another film about a jaded middle-class couple, Antonioni takes things to another level with La Notte.
What was so groundbreaking about La Notte was its muted dramatic tone. Over the course of less than a day, we see the "action" unfold, though in fact very little takes place. Instead we have a couple in crisis, both unable to express their emotions; instead, Antonioni hints at their emotional turmoil with abstract images, such as the broken clock that Lidia comes across on her long walk through Milan and the rust she peels off the door frame. The opening credits of La Notte are so cool, showing the tension between old and modern Milan, as is the use of machine music to soundtrack the reflected images of the city in the Pirelli skyscraper windows as the service lift descends into the chaos of the modern city. Milan at that time was at the epicentre of Italy’s economic boom.
What was so groundbreaking about La Notte was its muted dramatic tone. Over the course of less than a day, we see the "action" unfold, though in fact very little takes place. Instead we have a couple in crisis, both unable to express their emotions; instead, Antonioni hints at their emotional turmoil with abstract images, such as the broken clock that Lidia comes across on her long walk through Milan and the rust she peels off the door frame. The opening credits of La Notte are so cool, showing the tension between old and modern Milan, as is the use of machine music to soundtrack the reflected images of the city in the Pirelli skyscraper windows as the service lift descends into the chaos of the modern city. Milan at that time was at the epicentre of Italy’s economic boom.
Mastroianni plays author Giovanni Pontano, who has just written a book called La Stagione. His sick friend is reading it while hospitalised. The sight of the helicopter flying past his hospital window as he talks of his impending death seems to be an allusion to La Dolce Vita, in which a helicopter flies over Rome carrying a Christ statue. This time there is no redeemer, highlighting the social and emotional alienation of the modern world that Antonioni portrays so convincingly on screen. Antonioni, in an abstract way, is showing "the disease of emotions" in the modern society of his time, especially among men like Pontano who seem to have become indifferent to everything. It was an act of daring on Antonioni’s part to cast two film stars in the lead roles and require them to act in such a listless fashion.
While Giovanni is having an afternoon nap after a literary launch party, Lidia (played by Jeanne Moreau) is roaming the city looking at young men who are either fighting in gangs or letting off rockets. Her sexual yearning is palpable. The film is suffused with nostalgia for old Milan, and Antonioni shows us old shops, factories and churches that have fallen into disuse and are now overgrown with weeds. "I no longer have new ideas, only memories", says Giovanni at one point, as if the same has happened to him. The couple go to a pretentious literary party where the glorious Monica Vitti (playing the role of Valentina) becomes Giovanni’s new obsession. Antonioni’s cinematography during the party scene is really remarkable with its geometric, Mondrian-style shapes and the use of mirrors and reflections, especially the scene where Giovanni first encounters Valentina playing a board game.
Valentina has fun initially playing cat and mouse with Giovanni but then her emotions get conflicted, and when dawn breaks at the end of the film the light and the emotional mood of the film becomes softer. There's a rare touching moment at the end of the film when Lidia reads out one of Giovanni’s early love letters to her, but he breaks the spell of genuine emotion by asking who wrote her the letter! The scene perfectly encapsulates their emotional estrangement. Lidia knows they’ve fallen out of love but Giovanni won’t admit it, and in a desperate moment he tries to show emotion by pinning her down like an animal in a golf course bunker. In the final shot, Antonioni's camera slowly pans away from the couple, and we're left to wonder as ever what the future holds for them (and us).
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