La Notte Poster

La Notte (1961)

Drama  
Rayting:   8.0/10 18.5K votes
Country: Italy | France
Language: Italian | English
Release date: 24 February 1961

A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship.

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runamokprods 1 May 2014

Challenging and emotionally muted on 1st viewing, I still found this largely a very interesting portrait of a bourgeois marriage crumbling, observed during one afternoon and night.

The couple visit a seemingly dying friend in the hospital, attend a book signing for the husband's new novel, stop at a nightclub where they barely even react to an erotic floor show, and then head to a party for a rich industrialist who is celebrating the first win by his new racehorse, Both Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau do terrific work as the deadened and estranged couple. He no longer even identifies with his own writing, feeling it's just a product, like that made by the industrialist. He's even lost his sense of lust. She no longer feels love for him, and seems locked in loneliness and depression. It's a tough movie to take, grim, humorless, almost as dead feeling as its leads, but that would seem to be the point.

My only problem, as I've occasionally had with Antonioni, is that well before the end I felt I had gotten these themes clearly and powerfully, and there was, after that, a certain sense of hammering home ideas that had already been expressed beautifully with a lighter touch (there's a key reveal near the end that I saw coming a mile off). But the images (of course) are striking and memorable, as are the performances, and the sad gloom that hovers over this world of people who seem to have it all, and yet feel so little.

crculver 13 May 2017

Fmovies: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni shot a series of films exploring the psychological torment of his bourgeois protagonists. In spite of the wealth and security they established, they had no idea what they wanted in life or what they were supposed to do. In spite of busy social lives, they found it impossible to truly connect with other people. LA NOTTE, from 1961, is one of these, and I think it's the very best of them.

As the film opens, one morning in Milano, married couple Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) visit their friend Tomasso (Bernhard Wicki) in the hospital as he lays dying. Lidia is clearly shaken by the experience and, after Giovanni leaves for an appearance to promote his new book, the camera tracks Lidia through a long, aimless walk around Milano as she processes her thoughts. Here Antonioni (anticipating his later film Il Deserto Rosso) shows the drastically changing face of Milano in the postwar construction boom, and the appearance of new tech gadgetry in everyday life, as just one more way people can feel they have nothing certain they can hold on to in this world.

Giovanni and Lidia, while never outright squabbling, have clearly grown cold towards each other. Gradually one begins to wonder if there is any life left in their marriage whatsoever. Things come to a head, however, when Giovanni and Lidia go that evening to a party at a rich industrialist's villa, and Antonioni's favourite actress Monica Vitti appears. Vitti's role as a foil to Giovanni and Lidia is powerful and moving, but I think its precise nature should be left unsaid here, as it's better audiences aren't spoiled first.

A mere description of the plot might seem like nothing happens in this film besides bored people talking and yet another mid-century European cinematic tale of adultery. But LA NOTTE is a film of incredible visual poetry, almost like the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Even scenes that evoke the characters' boredom are shot as such beautiful tableaux that the viewer is enraptured. Antonioni often shoots his characters reflected in mirrors and the like, and there is some cinematic legerdemain here that just makes you go "wow".

Appearing in Antonioni's body of work between two similar films that are often considered a trilogy, LA NOTTE has often got less buzz than its predecessor L'AVVENTURA, with its daring plot twist, or its successor L'ECLISSE with its chic Monica Vitti-Alain Delon love affair. But I think that in terms of the picture-perfect visuals and elegant pacing, LA NOTTE deserves every bit as much praise as those other two classic films.

wobelix 29 June 2001

"Hush now, don't explain". That's the only thing missing in this wonderful picture of the Maestro: the eternal voice of Billie Holiday over some end-titles. Do not expect explanations, watch the actors carefully and all will be revealed. Neo-realistic ? Sure, look at the rugged camera-angles. A child cries her heart out and we never see her face fully. Of course Lidia walks up to her and strokes the little girls hair smilingly, only to loose interest immediately because of a broken down clock. Symbolism ? Just watch and feel these great actors.

chaos-rampant 31 March 2011

La Notte fmovies. It's not because of films like this that Antonioni is great for me, it's because he tutored with them and grew wiser for his later more important works. Because having dissected with simple precision the crushing dilemmas of whether or not love is possible, realizing this ineffability of human connection, he could see this was not the end of our suffering and if this was not the end, we could still not rule conclusively that we have no chance to attain peace in this life.

After he concluded with the two lovers willingly not pursuing their feelings at the end of L'Eclisse, he turned inwards, and with each subsequent film he peered under one more veil of false perception. But what was he trying to look into in La Notte, what does he find here?

La Notte is a step behind L'Eclisse, naturally. Here love matters, or is thought that it should, to the bitter end. The finale is overbearing with pessimism then because love fails to be that saving grace, that we're still alone, consumed by our desires. But that's not all of it either.

Even when Mastroyanni painfully knows that the love he cherished has vanished with time and habit, he still clings to it. Even a dragging routine is preferable than the emptiness of solitude. This is how love functions here, as a shelter that soothes the existential pains, or a mask that mercifully obscures them.

But these people are not simply lost adrift in faceless crowds and cold rooms, they're clinging on the craving of desire for their salvation. When I say that the mind is not transcended yet in these films of Antonioni's alienation phase, it's because it still dictates desire, the terms under which a meaningful life should be pursued.

But to show that love is not our saving grace because it's subject to the whims and tedium of time would be to concede that we are merciless at the hands of higher forces beyond our control, that we're not masters of our fate. It was important in this aspect to go a step beyond, to show us characters become aware of the emptiness of desire by willingly giving up on it. But for that we'd have to go ahead to L'Eclisse and Il Deserto Rosso.

By itself La Notte may seem like it's laboriously pondering to say too little. As part of an oeuvre though, it has a place that can't be dismissed lightly.

Quinoa1984 21 May 2006

La Notte is very content to be a film seemingly about the mundane in the bourgeois world of an Italian couple. But what makes it worthwhile is that the time that Antonioni gives for the scenes and actors to breathe- ironically enough considering their social and intimate repression- allows for some curious moments to slip through (some of his best directed). The married couple here of the great Marcello Mastroianni and face-of-a-thousand-words Jeanne Moreau are not necessarily un-happy but unsatisfied with how their lives are at this point. The husband is a very successful and admired author, and they are well off. But the question still arises, underneath as the subtext in many scenes, what's it all really worth? Two of the main set-pieces/sequences in the film revolve around Moreau walking around aimlessly through the city while her husband is at a signing party, and at a rich party at night with a spacious amount of room for the guests.

All of these little, seemingly mundane moments are not all that the film is made up of, and it is in this existential (if it is relatively speaking) crisis for this couple that what real life that's out there and real pains strike up here and there. I loved the moment where Mastroianni is confronted by a seemingly crazy girl at the hospital; is she really crazy, or just desperate for someone's affection or attention (she is later beat into submission by the nurses)? Or when Moreau sees a fight break out with some young men in the less well-off section of town, the hesitation and surprise suddenly throws the fighters off. The party itself- where-in the 'Night' of the title is revealed- has moments of dialog that strike up the symbolic points Antonioni is making. But unlike the director's previous film, the visual-side of the cinematography has its moments but not necessarily as extraordinary in its overall make-up. Yet the initial peaks of interest- both in the actors (particularly Moreau who is always a treasure) and in the final, contemplative act with Monica Vitti, endures with better results.

Maybe the least in the 'trilogy' that Antonioni made between 1960 and 1962, which still makes it more watchable than the usual art-house bores of late. There is almost TOO much room for pondering about these characters, which makes for what could be seen as 'dull', but it really isn't. Detached, maybe, but not hard to connect with if open enough, this is a very good film if not one of the director's best.

Fiona-39 23 July 2001

This is a hard film to sit through. Which is not to say it isn't worthwhile, or good, or even a masterpiece, but that the state of mind of the characters involved is hard to cope with - they are depressed, aimless, drifting, unable to make any emotional commitment in an atomised, alienating landscape that is, in the words of Henri Lefebvre, full of signs but absolutely no symbols. The symbols have been all used up, exhausted, just as the couple's love has been all used up. The truth of this film resides for me in its final scene when Moreau (Lidia) reads the old love letter out to Giovanni as a cold morning mist snakes around the golf course. It talks about waking up next to her and possessing her so completely that she is no longer herself, but part of him; utterly owned, 'an image I want to keep forever.' But now the image is tarnished, forgotten, and the woman is alone, abandoned -free of her cage, but utterly lost in the dark mean streets of modernity.

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