Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte begins with a champagne toast for a man dying of stomach cancer in a skyscraper sanatorium high above the streets of Milan. The entire movie is made up of these juxtapositions between organic rot and sleek, modernist renewal, recording the last gasps of a marriage during a long night’s journey into day. La Notte is the second in a seminal quartet of films starring his muse Monica Vitti — following L’Avventura but preceding L’Eclisse and Red Desert — in which Antonioni explored alienation via his characters’ relationships to their surroundings, turning the language of film inside out so that exterior elements express their interior lives. These are movies in which “nothing happens” to people because the story is told by the spaces around them. To some, these pictures contain multitudes. To others, they are the most boring movies ever made.
Yeah, Antonioni is an acquired taste. Orson Welles hated him so much he made a whole movie about it (The Other Side of the Wind) and I’ll confess that it took more than a few tries for these films to finally click for me. But now I’m obsessed with them. I find La Notte the cleanest and most confident expression of Antonioni’s particular sensibility, and not just because I’m a sucker for movies in which Marcello Mastroianni is having a terrible time at parties. Fellini’s favorite scamp stars here as Giovanni Pontano, a celebrated author with nothing left to write about. Gone is the mischievous flicker in Mastroianni’s eyes. He’s all hollowed out, citing Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers as one of his favorite books while he might as well be living it – somnambulantly drifting from one reception to another, unable to appreciate (or even believe) his own acclaim.
Jeanne Moreau plays his wife, Lidia, her eyes haunted and that famous pout perpetually downturned. It’s important that Antonioni cast two icons of international cinema because so much of La Notte feels like the sad sequel to a first film we never got to see, relying on us to fill in the history of Giovanni and Lidia’s marriage with our own memories of these stars in sunnier times. After visiting their terminally ill friend Tommaso in said skyscraper, the Pontanos make a miserable attempt at going out on a date. It’s their first time at a nightclub alone together in a few years, watching the bizarre contortions of a Black exotic dancer with a wine glass, realizing that they might as well go to that party they’ve been putting off because they’ve got nothing left to say to each other.
The place is crazy. Absurdly opulent, with something like 30,000 rose bushes according to the owner — a ridiculously wealthy industrialist who has his eye on our famous novelist for a lucrative PR job. Prior to the party scene – which takes up the entire second half of the film – these characters have been photographed in opposition to their surroundings, a la Moreau taking a tour through the ruins of postwar Milan while shiny, silver skyscrapers are going up around her. But during the second hour they’re enveloped, swallowed by a gilded cocoon of reflective window glass, shiny surfaces, bare balconies and vast expanses of architecture that loom over the couple like an empty abyss. The party house is one of the most wondrous movie sets you’ll ever see, a labyrinth of blank spaces with nobody to fill them in.
Except for Valentina. Our host’s 22-year-old daughter is played by Vitti with a mercurial insouciance. She’s clad in a similar spaghetti-strap cocktail dress and her trademark platinum tresses covered in a pitch-black wig to match Moreau’s, making Mastroianni’s attraction an even bigger insult. Giovanni and Lidia have been working their way around the party looking for new and attractive ways to hurt each other, and she’s by far the newest and most attractive. Giovanni’s flailing attempts to seduce her are desperate, pathetic and entirely understandable.
Antonioni likes to keep his actors turned away from us. He denies the emotional access most filmmakers labor to provide, instead forcing us to find meaning in the blocking and bodily juxtapositions as key to his characters’ internal turmoil. (So much screen time is spent staring at Vitti and Moreau’s bare backs, if there’s such a thing as a shoulder blade fetish community they’ll give this film five stars.) It’s a movie about a marriage that is over and artistic ideas that are dashed – just more of the rubble being bulldozed to build a sleeker, smoother future out of chrome surfaces that show you everything and reveal nothing. Everything in the movie is in the process of being replaced with an emptier, more mechanical version of what came before, so by the end when this writer’s wife reads aloud from one of his old love letters, he doesn’t even recognize the author. 
“La Notte” is streaming on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and Kanopy.
