Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau.
In a Nutshell: A writer and his socialite wife become aware of their loveless marriage.
La notte is the middle chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incommunicability Trilogy and the most frustrating to endure. Its main couple, a successful writer named Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his bored wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), are the sort of people we cannot help but hold no sympathy for. Both are wealthy, attractive, surrounded by friends of equal stature and spend their lives attending parties and mixing with high culture. Both can barely pretend there is any life left in their marriage as Giovanni shamelessly chases women while Lidia half-heartedly deflects advances from other men. As both move from one social gathering to the next, it becomes to clear just how far the crack in their relationship has grown.
La notte is the middle chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incommunicability Trilogy and the most frustrating to endure. Its main couple, a successful writer named Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his bored wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), are the sort of people we cannot help but hold no sympathy for. Both are wealthy, attractive, surrounded by friends of equal stature and spend their lives attending parties and mixing with high culture. Both can barely pretend there is any life left in their marriage as Giovanni shamelessly chases women while Lidia half-heartedly deflects advances from other men. As both move from one social gathering to the next, it becomes to clear just how far the crack in their relationship has grown.
Antonioni has always been a director of spaces. Wide, desolate planes where his character’s hopelessness and modern angst fills the screen. Everything down to the parties that Lidia and Giovanni attend feel uninhabited. Thankfully, Antonioni’s style gives his material a maturity and restraint that could have easily delved into over-wrought visual clichés. Particularly since Giovanni and Lidia’s problems are not revolutionary in film’s history of marital crisis’s. But it is familiar and the viewer’s own loneliness and insecurity becomes the film’s backdrop.
One of the aspects presented with a great sadness is the transition from an old-fashioned Catholic world to a secularist one. As duty-bound to their union as Giovanni and Lidia are, each is drawn into hedonism, though no one acts on infidelity. Their greatest struggle seems to be the burden of being decent people, unwilling to confront their issues to each other for fear of tarnishing some old moral code. As the empty, aged cities crumble around our couple, we see the values of yesterday begin to dissolve with every hopelessly uncaring look between them. Each is afraid to speak up and shatter the fragile illusion of their happy marriage. By the end, as man and wife make for one last grasp to reestablish their love, even we know that nothing can mend their rift.
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