Review of La Notte (1961) by Reece L — 12 Dec 2015

If L'Avventura is about the possibility of fulfillment through interpersonal contact and L'Eclisse is a study of whether or not love can exist, La Notte is the pessimistic hybrid of both of these ideas, a case for the notion that the demise of the pure and the whole is always right around the corner, ready to pounce the second complacency sets in.

The "night" referenced in the title can be several things, including the literal night, a period of time when the world is at its most unhinged and its most unknowable, a time in in which people behave in ways they normally may not, acting on hidden desires and reverting to their basest, most primitive forms. It also refers to death and the idea that the new will always rise to overtake the old, killing what was in order to create a space for the future. Valentina is the manifestation of all of these concepts, a representation of the practice of living life fully uninhibited by the presence this cycle. She is the night, she is the new, and she is the harbinger of death.

Death is not always immediate, either. It sometimes comes in the form of decay, something that is made explicit in the representation of a collapsing building that Lidia visits while having an existential crisis stemming from a sudden awareness of her own decaying relationship. Throughout this scene, the sounds of the future are always there to offset the visual remnants of her past manifested in an old park that she used to visit with Giovanni. Eventually, these new forms of advancement will fall to the wayside and become obsolete themselves, as per the cycle that anchors the film.

Antonioni ventures a guess as to why this must happen, pointing to the perceptions we have of loved ones and the reflections we put out there for others to use to generate their own perceptions of ourselves. Visual reflections are everywhere in La Notte, the very first shot a reflection of the city that is being generated by a skyscraper that is itself a part of the city its reflects. There is no escape from the calculated or the projected or the learned as the systems that govern society are rooted in these concepts. Giovanni's writing is a reflection of the way he wants to be seen; an intellectual, someone who is able to constantly exist in the dark of night as a purveyor of the new and the experimental. This is a false projection, however; he later admits he'll never write again, acknowledging his inevitable decay into obsolescence. Lidia is already there, sitting on the outskirts of the parties they attend quietly watching the frivolity she has already outgrown. Valentina may have been the catalyst for their ultimate end, but it was inevitable either way as they fell in love with the idea of each other without knowing who their partner really was. When Lidia reads Giovanni a letter from the beginning of their relationship detailing the extent of their love, he doesn't even remember that he wrote it. And is it worth staying together? Is it at all feasible? Is the notion of existing counter to the future a life at all?

La Notte is by far the darkest of Antonioni's trilogy, containing illness, death, and numbness (medicated and otherwise), all stemming from an inevitable and immediate loss of fulfillment as these moments are fleeting and unsustainable. The night brings bliss, but the cold light of day always follows close behind, the loss made plain and the possibility of the future then clearly perceived as a inescapable source of destruction.