My re-evaluation of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni began before his death (30 July) with the 2001 documentary "Antonioni: The Vision that Changed the Cinema," and with the DVD releases of "Le amíche" and "The Passenger." Remembering how bored I was by the middle film of the "alienation trilogy" (L'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse) when I saw it long ago (during the 1970s, not the 1960s), I knew that I would have to overcome repugnance or be in a masochistic mood to put "Le Notte" in my DVD player and press "Play."

My expectations for "La notte ("The Night," 1961) were very low. I knew there was no plot and little character development, and was prepared to admire visual compositions. Early in the film, it is obvious that the rich and arbitrary Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) has fallen out of love with her successful writer husband Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni, who had just played a writer observing excesses of the rich in Fellini's "La dolce vita"). It is unclear whether he has also fallen out of love with her and is just catering to her whims.

They are visiting a dying friend, Tomasso (German director Bernhard Wicki) whom we later learn was a mentor to Lidia (Guido Ajmone Marsan). She quickly leaves the hospital room, declining the champagne he has ordered for his guests. After a sexually charged encounter with a mentally disturbed patient (Maria Pia Luzi) Giovanni finds Lidia outside crying.

Then she wanders through the streets alone, stopping to watch some young men setting off rockets. After she summons Giovanni to pick her up and dresses for a party being thrown by an industrialist (Vincenzo Corbella), she says she doesn't want to go to the party. Instead, they go to a nightclub, where the floor-show involves skimpily dressed (/fetishized) black performers.

They do go to the garden party, where each has a flirtation (seemingly more out of boredom than desire) that is not physically consummated. After an impressive feat of walking through grass in stiletto heels Lidia reads a very long declaration of undying love that Giovanni once wrote her and tells him that they are over. After which they roll in the dust (couples doing it in the dirt seems an Antonioni fetish--I think it occurred in "Red Desert," but definitely happens in "Le amíche," "Il grido," and multiplied in "Zabriskie Point."

I neglected to mention a sudden downpour and various guests jumping fully dressed into the swimming pool. I'm pretty sure that this is supposed to be read as "decadence." I probably should have rewatched "La dolce vita" for the context, though the arbitrariness and nastiness of the rich folks in "Le amíche" and "L'avventura" served to remind me of Antonioni's contempt for the leisure class and fascination with how they and their environment looks. (Antonioni seems to me to have been a communist with no interest in "the universal class," and totally besotted by watching the parasites, and actually sympathetic to entrepreneurs.

Why anyone should be interested in Lidia or Marcello or their hollowed out shell of a marriage is a question I can't answer. Mastroianni and Moreau were attractive people whom "the camera loved," and, as always, there are many striking visual compositions. And "La notte" is 18 minutes shorter than "L'avventura" (122:140), though even less happens in "La notte" than in "L'avventura."

Although boosted by "Red Desert," "La notte" was the film that best typifies Antoniennui--a boring film about bored, unhappy, affluent people. It has some very impressive shots of reflections (cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo is the real star of the "show" IMO). The aimless walk through some edge of Milan lacks the natural and the man-made backdrops of "L'avventura." "La notte" has action of sorts in the limber black woman who performs in the night club during the middle of the film (but while the night is still young...).

Although surely "La notte" would bore youngsters (and oldsters and those in between), there is no nudity. Rather than an orgy at the party ("La dolce vita"), there are fully clothes partygoers in the swimming pool. There is no sex, though the vampire nymphomaniac in the hospital jumps Giovanni and Lidia goes off with a would-be seducer. Except for the hospitalized nymphomaniac, there is no real lasciviousness in the film. The only sensuousness is Moreau's walking on those high, thin heels.

The couple treat each other politely, and even inebriated the partygoers don't get aggressive. Their lives may be empty and their whims childish, but they are no shown oppressing anyone. (Indeed, they seem less anguished and self-destructive than the only working-class lead I can remember in any Antonioni film, the one Steve Cochran played in "Il Grido."

---

The DVD has a trailer and talent files and a sharp transfer, but no commentary to provide additional stimulation while watching the film and reading the subtitles of the dubbed-in-Italian film.



------

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

I've written about the earlier four Antonioni films that are available on DVD:
Cronaca di una amore (1950)
L'amíche (1955)
L'Aventtura (1960)
Il Grido (1957),
the one that was popular beyond art-house theaters,
Blow-Up (1966),
and his putrid contribution to the trilogy Eros (2004)


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age