La Notte

Monica Vitti

I recently revisited Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte for the first time in about four decades and felt that, as a piece of film craft, it has held up rather well. I've always been of two minds about Antonioni. He was obviously a cinematic master, able to express anomie through a mise en scene that displays man adrift in a modern maze of his own making. The opening segment of La Notte which pictures Milan as a grid of modernist architecture is the foremost example of this, a cold and gleaming evocation of alienation circa 1961.   

Antonioni's lack of warmth and humor has always bugged me, though. His characters often seem like ciphers, existing only to put across philosophical concepts. The party at a large estate that takes up most of the runtime of The Night is a good example of this. The central married couple of the film, played by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, flirt with potential lovers, but the party, though extravagant, is listless and enervating. As one character puts it, "Nothing ever happens." Society ends up applauding a horse's ass. The reaction against Antonioni's pretensions was best summed up by the title of Pauline Kael's famous essay, The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties in which she also dissed La Dolce Vita and Last Year at Marienbad. 

Characterization is lacking in Antonioni's work. Mastroianni is playing a famous writer, but has little to say except meaningless epigrams like "D'Annunzio's turtle died of colic after eating flowers." His character is supposed to be a hollow man, but Mastroianni is too soulful a performer to be convincing. This is the same conundrum as when he played Camus' Meursault in Visconti's L'Étranger. There is a similar vacuity to Moreau's character, who like Mastroianni is able to project at least a spark of personality with her eyes. The couple reconcile at the end by rutting in the mire: Antonioni's version of a happy ending. 

No one in the film registers as a flesh and blood human in the film. Bernhard Wicki's performance as a dying friend at the start of the picture is so ridiculously overwrought that one appreciates Moreau and Mastroianni's restraint in comparison. The nymphomaniac who attempts to seduce Mastroianni in the hospital seems to emanate from another picture, perhaps the cartoonish pulp of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor.  

What I have come to appreciate as I get more decrepit is the formal beauty of La Notte. Gianni Di Venanzo's high contrast, black and white cinematography sings. Life may be relatively meaningless for Antonioni, but it has a visual and erotic charge. The characters in the film do not seem specific because they are functioning within variations on a theme: duet for husband and lover, duet for wife and lover, a duet of love until death for wife and husband. It may be discordant, but as La Notte unspools, I hear music.