Antonioni made three films in quick succession in the early 1960s, L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and The Eclipse (1962). All three featured Monica Vitti, and were in black and white. After the fashion of the time, critics promptly labelled them a trilogy, which they changed to tetralogy when Antonioni came up with another film with Vitti, this time in colour: Red Desert (1964).
In fact the three films that belong together are L’avventura, The Eclipse and Red Desert, all of which not only star Vitti but are actually about her. La notte, in which Vitti has only a minor role, is something of an odd one out and has suffered accordingly. It is less often revived and is only now appearing on DVD. This is a pity. It has two wonderful performances from two wonderful actors – Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau – and it brilliantly captures the surface beauty and underlying malaise of the kind of modernity that Italy was just beginning to enter in the early 1960s.
The same contrast between what is on the surface and what may or may not be going on underneath is played out in the marriage of the two central characters. As the film progresses they become aware that they no longer seem to love each other in the way they did, or thought they did, before. But as to what other feelings they have besides the ones they used to have towards each other, they are both at a loss – though in typical Antonioni fashion the woman in the couple is shown as more self-aware and capable of introspection than the man. They are each tempted by the thought of adultery – he with the Vitti character, she with a playboy nonentity – but for whatever reason they don’t go through with it. The story takes place over just under 24 hours, from mid-morning, when the couple go to visit a dying friend, to dawn the following day when they are shown trying to rekindle their lost affection by making love on a golf course while the sounds of the party they have just left waft through the morning air.
Please, nobody repeat the old refrain about how in Antonioni films nothing happens.
One of the masterworks of 1960s cinema, La Notte marked yet another development in the stylistic evolution of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, and solidified his reputation as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. It's both a sprawling study of Italy's upper middle-classes and an x-ray of modern man's psychic desolation, questioning whether love and communication are possible in a world built on sexual hysteria.
Two of the giants of film-acting, Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, come together as a married couple living in crisis. He is a renowned author and "public intellectual"; she is "the wife." Over the course of one day and the night into which it bleeds, the pair re-examine their emotional bonds, and grapple with the question of whether love and communication are even possible in a world built out of profligate idylls and sexual hysteria.
New restoration of the film in its original 1.75:1 aspect ratio with previously-censored sequences restored for the first time
New and improved English subtitles
Original Italian theatrical trailer
40-page booklet with a new essay by film-critic and scholar Brad Stevens, and the transcript of a lengthy Q&A conducted in 1961 with Antonioni upon the film's release.
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La Notte (Masters of Cinema)
