La Notte (12) |Home Ents Review
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1961, 122 mins, in Italian with subtitles
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti
Review by Colin Dibben
It puts the art into arthouse, even more than Antonioni’s previous film, L’Avventura, which at least had a mystery at its heart. Here, the void beckons. It is unmissable.
Giovanni (Mastroianni) is a celebrated intellectual and author. Lidia (Moreau) is his wife. After they go to see a dying friend in a Milanese hospital, tensions in their marriage are revealed over the course of one long day and night.
Not much happens and nothing important is said until the end. Lidia, especially, simply wanders – about the streets of Milan and then at a party – but somehow Moreau manages to give the performance of her career.
Italian neo-realism sought to represent life including all the boring bits, usually focusing on working class lives. La Notte is thoroughly bourgeois, and teases with the tedium of non-events and lack of real communication between characters (even though there is a lot of talking), to highlight a mid-century crisis of progressive ideals and the inescapable, deadening power of urban environments. The only relief is the film style itself – and that is immaculate.
La Notte’s crisp desolation stands in utter contrast to Fellini’s fecund La Dolce Vita, which had made a star of Mastroianni the year before. There are several tips of the hat here to that film – as if Antonioni is giving us a different, much less optimistic, vision of the same lifestyles.
This is a worldwide premiere for the 4K UHD presentation of the film. Gianni di Venanzo’s black-and-white photography is absolutely stunning, with the many reflections in glass finally getting their intended presence.
There are a couple of very good extras: Richard Dyer examines the ambivalences of the film and Giorgio Gaslini who composed the soundtrack and appears in the second half tells great anecdotes about his involvement in the production.
