Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra
Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Music: Giorgio Gaslini
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast: Marcello Mastrolanni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki, Maria Pia Luzi, Gitt Magrini, Vincenzo Corbella, Rosy Mazzacurati, Umberto Eco
“Sometimes beauty can really be depressing” is a random line of dialogue earkt in La Notte, where, in fact, all the lines of dialogue can be taken as random. It could well represent the theme not only for this picture but for the larger “Trilogy of Incommunicability” of which it is the second part. Director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s project started with the much-decorated L’Avventura (1960), continued with La Notte, and finished on L’Eclisse (1962). As usually happens with three-packs like this, the second one tends to get shorted in terms of credit. For example, La Notte is presently ranked at #196 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? whereas L’Eclisse sits at #130 and L’Avventura is in the top 40 at #38.
I would call La Notte my favorite of the bunch, but I suspect it’s only because my long-term quarrels with the other two have been resolved by time and learning how to look at Antonioni movies. Just look. Don’t try to connect. Connections come unbidden. You see how thoroughly composed within the frames his shots are, the placement of objects, heads, and bodies, using techniques as needed such as deep focus for contrast and startling images. The narrative is in a dated style, out of self-conscious midcentury existential texts. It takes place in Milan, a bustling city with ongoing construction and traffic jams. The main couple here—the novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his elaborately “alienated,” sometimes almost zombie-like wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)—wander this urban landscape aimlessly. Eventually we learn that, while Giovanni is a respected novelist with a new one just out, it is Lidia who has all the money and whatever control it might give her. They seem perfectly happy to spend their time going from place to place, seeing people, mingling, posing. Well, maybe not perfectly happy.
“Sometimes beauty can really be depressing” is a random line of dialogue earkt in La Notte, where, in fact, all the lines of dialogue can be taken as random. It could well represent the theme not only for this picture but for the larger “Trilogy of Incommunicability” of which it is the second part. Director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s project started with the much-decorated L’Avventura (1960), continued with La Notte, and finished on L’Eclisse (1962). As usually happens with three-packs like this, the second one tends to get shorted in terms of credit. For example, La Notte is presently ranked at #196 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? whereas L’Eclisse sits at #130 and L’Avventura is in the top 40 at #38.
I would call La Notte my favorite of the bunch, but I suspect it’s only because my long-term quarrels with the other two have been resolved by time and learning how to look at Antonioni movies. Just look. Don’t try to connect. Connections come unbidden. You see how thoroughly composed within the frames his shots are, the placement of objects, heads, and bodies, using techniques as needed such as deep focus for contrast and startling images. The narrative is in a dated style, out of self-conscious midcentury existential texts. It takes place in Milan, a bustling city with ongoing construction and traffic jams. The main couple here—the novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his elaborately “alienated,” sometimes almost zombie-like wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)—wander this urban landscape aimlessly. Eventually we learn that, while Giovanni is a respected novelist with a new one just out, it is Lidia who has all the money and whatever control it might give her. They seem perfectly happy to spend their time going from place to place, seeing people, mingling, posing. Well, maybe not perfectly happy.
La Notte feels avant-garde modern in a distinctly early-‘60s way, like a stagy Samuel Beckett play, but the incidents that happen along the way are still unusual, interesting, and often surprising. It starts in a hospital, where Giovanni and Lidia are visiting a friend who is dying and trying to accept it. On the way out they are separated—a main feature here is that Lidia goes where she wants, when she wants, sometimes she doesn’t even seem to know herself—and Giovanni is randomly pulled into the hospital room of a woman who is evidently mentally ill (Maria Pia Luzi). She takes him by surprise, pulling him into her bed and shucking off her hospital gown. Giovanni is at least not uninterested sexually but soon enough composes himself and gets out of there before anything happens. It’s the last we see or hear of her.
Giovanni and Lidia continue to reconnect and drift apart all through the picture, like a background rhythm. The picture is full of people who appear and then vanish. It takes more than an hour before we get to Valentina (Monica Vitti) as a kind of straw that stirs the night’s drink, an ingenue who is elaborately bored but somehow seems sincere under all that, like you see right through the pose. Giovanni finds her off alone by herself at the party, in a room with a giant checkerboard on the floor. She’s playing a self-devised game on it, sliding her compact and trying to keep it on the board and land it in the final row if she can. She is flirtatious but only as a way of being sociable. Obviously he is not anyone she could be interested in.
Before the party Giovanni and Lidia ate dinner to a nightclub where the exotic floor show was two beturbaned Negro performers—“Negro” feels like the appropriate term in this specific 1961 moment. The woman is particularly athletic, doffing parts of her costume for stunts with a wineglass balanced on her forehead and elsewhere, contorting herself and never spilling a drop. She gets a fair amount of screen time and it’s a memorable act, so I was surprised to see how little credit she seems to be getting. If she’s credited at either IMDb or Wikipedia I could not make out her specific name from the various clues given. That seems problematic. Is it something about the performance?
The picture climaxes in the second half on the lengthy party scene at the lavish estate of some titan of industry. The ever-wandering Lidia, as usual, gravitates hither and yon while Giovanni can’t help himself in 1961 style and tries to make time with Valentina. Lidia is perfectly enigmatic but things generally seem to go her way always. In the wee small hours, exhausted and sitting around a kitchen, Valentina tells them, “You two have really worn me out tonight.” As a viewer I can sympathize but we’re not done yet. In the dawn’s early light Giovanni and Lidia walk the neighboring golf course, carrying on their usual desultory conversation down the fairway and in a lightly wooded copse. Finally they are seen passionately making out in a sand trap. I don’t know how you can argue with that in terms of angst, capitalism, existentialism, emptiness, bleak heartless universe, etc., so on so forth. Sometimes beauty can really be depressing.
Giovanni and Lidia continue to reconnect and drift apart all through the picture, like a background rhythm. The picture is full of people who appear and then vanish. It takes more than an hour before we get to Valentina (Monica Vitti) as a kind of straw that stirs the night’s drink, an ingenue who is elaborately bored but somehow seems sincere under all that, like you see right through the pose. Giovanni finds her off alone by herself at the party, in a room with a giant checkerboard on the floor. She’s playing a self-devised game on it, sliding her compact and trying to keep it on the board and land it in the final row if she can. She is flirtatious but only as a way of being sociable. Obviously he is not anyone she could be interested in.
Before the party Giovanni and Lidia ate dinner to a nightclub where the exotic floor show was two beturbaned Negro performers—“Negro” feels like the appropriate term in this specific 1961 moment. The woman is particularly athletic, doffing parts of her costume for stunts with a wineglass balanced on her forehead and elsewhere, contorting herself and never spilling a drop. She gets a fair amount of screen time and it’s a memorable act, so I was surprised to see how little credit she seems to be getting. If she’s credited at either IMDb or Wikipedia I could not make out her specific name from the various clues given. That seems problematic. Is it something about the performance?
The picture climaxes in the second half on the lengthy party scene at the lavish estate of some titan of industry. The ever-wandering Lidia, as usual, gravitates hither and yon while Giovanni can’t help himself in 1961 style and tries to make time with Valentina. Lidia is perfectly enigmatic but things generally seem to go her way always. In the wee small hours, exhausted and sitting around a kitchen, Valentina tells them, “You two have really worn me out tonight.” As a viewer I can sympathize but we’re not done yet. In the dawn’s early light Giovanni and Lidia walk the neighboring golf course, carrying on their usual desultory conversation down the fairway and in a lightly wooded copse. Finally they are seen passionately making out in a sand trap. I don’t know how you can argue with that in terms of angst, capitalism, existentialism, emptiness, bleak heartless universe, etc., so on so forth. Sometimes beauty can really be depressing.
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