Review of La Notte (1961) by John B — 10 Feb 2014

Films very often deceive the viewer into thinking them simpler than they are. La notte, my first experience with Antonioni, takes this truism to an extreme. It is a film which could very easily be misread as being about nothing (or next to nothing) whatsoever: at a glance, it consists of nothing more than a day and a night, during which Giovanni and Lidia fall out of love whilst doing a great deal of standing and staring. While this reductive description holds true, Antonioni has painted a devastating portrait of bourgeois isolation and conformism which hinges greatly on the gaps which if not properly understood could become boring. Although La notte overextends itself somewhat by trying to paint too comprehensive a portrait of this situation, it is a film which nevertheless succeeds in painting a precise and damning picture of bourgeois emptiness and superficiality at a level matching almost that of Renoir's La Règle du Jeu.

The film centres on Giovanni, an writer and up and coming member of the intelligentsia, and his wife Lidia, and their drifting apart whilst retaining all the outward rituals of a couple. La notte opens with the couple visiting their friend Tommaso in hospital, a visit which lays down early on their lack of communication; barely a word is exchanged between them the entire time, with the bedbound Tommaso instead communicating with Giovanni and Lidia in turn. From the first shot of her face until the last almost without interruption, Lidia, played by Jeanne Moreau, wears an inscrutable expression, clearly discontented but never vocally so until the film's end. At the subsequent public appearances, the pair enters as such before splintering away from one another, reuniting only sporadically until the final sequence. That their marriage is dysfunctional is clear, but Antonioni's explanation, which he haphazardly develops throughout the film as a theme parallel to that of the public/private, is of a sexual neurosis which feels ill thought through and poorly presented. Much of the exposition of this theme is dialogic and dull, while a scene in a night club where a dancer erotically manipulates a glass of wine while Lidia manipulates her own in her hands, though potentially insightful, is less rewarding than Antonioni's more pointed social commentaries.

It is in these social situations, when the couple are forced to interact with the milieu of upper class Milan, that Antonioni is most at home, and the studied ambiguity of his characters' expressions most powerful. For example, he has Giovanni listen smiling while the wealthy businessman Gherardini delivers a platitude about his artistic approach to entrepreneurship. By cutting between Gherardini, talking passionately, and the stiff, smiling Giovanni, Antonioni effectively asks the viewer to stage a sort of psychological intervention and second-guess Giovanni's thoughts. Again and again and to great effect, Antonioni frames his shots and directs his actors in such a way that they hint at a great deal and tell very little, in effect holding up a mirror to the audience and encouraging their intervention in creating the sort of psychological profile typically required by audiences then and now. Were it not for the fact that Antonioni is more obscure when trying to develop the more sexual aspects of his wry social commentary, La notte would be a stronger film. As it is, it remains a well-made, complex and thoughtful film.