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<\/em>) and I\u2019ll confess that it took more than a few tries for these films to finally click for me. But now I\u2019m obsessed with them. I find La Notte<\/em> the cleanest and most confident expression of Antonioni\u2019s particular sensibility, and not just because I\u2019m a sucker for movies in which Marcello Mastroianni is having a terrible time at parties. Fellini\u2019s favorite scamp stars here as Giovanni Pontano, a celebrated author with nothing left to write about. Gone is the mischievous flicker in Mastroianni\u2019s eyes. He\u2019s all hollowed out, citing Hermann Broch\u2019s The Sleepwalkers <\/em>as one of his favorite books while he might as well be living it \u2013 somnambulantly drifting from one reception to another, unable to appreciate (or even believe) his own acclaim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeanne Moreau plays his wife, Lidia, her eyes haunted and that famous pout perpetually downturned. It\u2019s important that Antonioni cast two icons of international cinema because so much of La Notte<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve been putting off because they\u2019ve got nothing left to say to each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 which takes up the entire second half of the film \u2013 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\u2019re 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\u2019ll ever see, a labyrinth of blank spaces with nobody to fill them in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Except for Valentina. Our host\u2019s 22-year-old daughter is played by Vitti with a mercurial insouciance. She\u2019s clad in a similar spaghetti-strap cocktail dress and her trademark platinum tresses covered in a pitch-black wig to match Moreau\u2019s, making Mastroianni\u2019s 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\u2019s by far the newest and most attractive. Giovanni\u2019s flailing attempts to seduce her are desperate, pathetic and entirely understandable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019 internal turmoil. (So much screen time is spent staring at Vitti and Moreau\u2019s bare backs, if there\u2019s such a thing as a shoulder blade fetish community they\u2019ll give this film five stars.) It\u2019s a movie about a marriage that is over and artistic ideas that are dashed \u2013 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\u2019s wife reads aloud from one of his old love letters, he doesn\u2019t even recognize the author. “La Notte” is streaming on HBO Max<\/a>, The Criterion Channel<\/a>, and Kanopy.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/la-notte-1024x546.jpg\")
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