La Notte

La Notte -- Antonioni’s 1961 film depicts a day in the life of a miserable married couple, played by Marcello Mastrioanni and Jeanne Moreau (implacable, her face set into a rigid mask of aloof despair). Inevitably, the movie seems like a rip-off of La Dolce Vita which Fellini made in the preceding year. Antonioni seems aware of this fact – in an early scene set in a hospital, a friend of the couple is painfully perishing, there is a whooshing sound and, when the camera tilts toward the window, we see a helicopter zooming away over the rooftops of Milan. This seems a direct reference to the famous helicopter Christophorus sequence that initiates Fellini’s bigger and more ambitious picture. There are many pretty shots in La Notte and some of the spectacle is riveting – for instance, a night club where a black female performer somehow contrives to contort her body in knots around a glass filled with champagne that she carries on her forehead – but, in the end, the film feels about as dead as Jeanne Moreau’s eyes. Antonioni’s earlier L’Avventura is a landmark and holds up wonderfully: it remains a spooky desolate masterpiece and L’Eclisse, which followed this picture, is formally astounding and innovative if a wee bit vacant. But La Notte doesn’t contain anything that Fellini didn’t do better, with more flair, and, of course, infinitely more histrionics in La Dolce Vita. Antonioni’ despair is less encyclopedic than Fellini’s – La Dolce Vita is a much bigger film – but La Notte probably cuts deeper. The last half hour – from the onset of the midnight rainstorm like the shower in Fellini’s I’Vittelloni (Fellini’s traces are everywhere) to the love scene staged improbably on a sandtrap at a golf course is a grave, elegant, and, profoundly melancholy: Antonioni’s grappling lovers in the cold dawn look like grey versions of some Francis Bacon’s sex-drenched canvasses from the same period. Monica Vitti appears late in the film as one temptation posed to Mastrioanni’s character (the other is her father’s offer that he go to work for his corporation, writing the history of the business for a “top salary” – in Mad Men, Don Draper adores this film). Vitti’s character speaks in wry epigrams and she has more life than most of the other figure in the film: “I’m not intelligent,” she says, “But I am alert.” Dawn is insidious in this film, brightening the landscape strewn with detritus from the party. We see lights shining forlornly indoors as the day becomes lighter. The little jazz combo is still playing, a candelabra on the piano, next to the dance-floor built around a statue of Pan. Jeanne Moreau says something like this: “As if music would improve a day like this.” One thing is certain from La Notte and La Dolce Vita: wealthy Italians really know how to throw a party – I guess Ghaddafi learned this attending Berlusconi’s Bunga Bunga parties.