Over one day and one night, lives unfold and bourgeois allusions questioned in director Michelangelo Antonioni’s slow yet revelatory story of a marriage.
Struggling with the news that friend Tommaso (Bernhard Wicki – Spider’s Web, Paris Texas) has terminal cancer, glamourous couple Lidia and Giovanni Pontano immerse themselves in their own worlds. At the celebratory reception for Giovanni’s (Marcello Mastroianni – La dolce vita, Leo the Last) latest novel, he basks in the glory whilst attempting to seduce Valentina (Monica Vitti – L’avventura, Modesty Blaise), the host’s daughter. Lidia (Jeanne Moreau – Jules et Jim, The Lovers) slips away unnoticed, wandering the deserted streets of Milan questioning her marriage.
Seemingly cold in its black and white stylishness, La notte is an existential question of life and death. It’s Italian verite cinema of Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini and early Bertolucci – on the surface, a simple story of a disintegrating marriage that masks deeper personal and social questions. A little too long and indulgent, Antonioni’s (L’avventura, Blow-Up) feature is nevertheless engagingly complex and layered.
Rating: 76%
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