LA NOTTE Movie Review

The Night
La Nuit

In Milan, a middle-class writer (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) appear to have come to the end of their road together; without passion or a conviction that they need to stay together, they spend one long and lonely night observing the shapes and sounds of the city around them, trying to make sense of what appears to be a chaotic and uncaring world. Without specific references to the post-war/cold war angst that saturates the 1961 of La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni nevertheless evokes that world with the vividness that only a true poet can. By dawn, the couple have indeed come to an understanding, but it's not the simple Hollywood solution of simply staying or leaving. Antonioni's concern is with the daunting prospect of coping with the modern world while not living in denial; in La Notte the terrors of the night may not lead to reborn, romantic dawn, but they also don't lead to utter despair. We mustn't be afraid to dig down into ourselves, he seems to tell us, for even though self-knowledge may not lead to happiness, the alternative leads only to oblivion. La Notte won the Grand Prize (Golden Bear) at the Berlin Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … L'Avventura, Red Desert, The Magician

1960 122m/B IT Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki, Maria Pia Luzi, Rosy Mazzacurati, Grigor Taylor; D: Michelangelo Antonioni; W: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra; C: Gianni Di Venanzo; M: Girogio Gaslini. NYR