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Michelangelo Antonioni is an architect of the cinematic form. The Italian director reinvented film language and greatly influenced the course of art house cinema –– a genre of mostly independent and foreign films that deal with taboo subjects or employ unconventional aesthetic styles.

Antonini rendered objects, space and buildings as extensions of the inner psychological states of his characters. He was a literal symbolist, and his imagery was absolute. Antonioni often lamented overly intellectual readings of his films, encouraging a more instinctive approach to engage with his films. Ultimately, Antonioni extracted meaning from abstraction.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of “La Notte,” the middle child of Antonioni’s alienation and disillusionment trilogy, which consists of “L’Avventura,” “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse.” “La Notte” has somewhat fallen by the wayside in popularity and discussion among film circles, as it is not as influential as “L’Avventura” — a story in which the male protagonist’s lover goes missing on a remote island — nor as formally radical as “L’Eclisse,” a tale of how a romance is impacted by an eclipse. Yet it is still a stunning piece of art that is arguably Antonioni’s best film.

“La Notte” is a poignant formalist masterwork that charts the emotional despondence and interior degradation of a failing loveless marriage. The film takes place over the course of a single day and night, externalized in the prosaic modernist architecture of 1960s Milan. The couple goes on separate journeys trying to remember what brought them together in the first place and to confront their estrangement from each other and the social circles they traverse.

After visiting a dying friend in the hospital, which incites an existential awakening, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) begin to recognize the lovelessness of their marriage and the internal and unspoken collapse of their relationship. They are no longer the people they used to be. They are simply pretending.

Slowly, they register the artifice of their relationship that was only held together by time and habit.

“I’ve been selfish. It’s strange to realize only now that what we give to others comes back to us,” Giovanni says in the film.

Giovanni carries himself passively. And in his passivity, he has become emotionally and intellectually vacant. As a best-selling author, he is no longer able to write from new ideas and inspirations, only from memories. For Giovanni, originality is no longer possible in the modern world, as anything worth saying has already been said and everything else is merely reflections.

At first glance, Lidia is more cynical and world-weary than her husband. But as we follow her journey, Lidia reveals to be an intelligent and capable woman who is burdened by her intellectual subjugation to her husband. Over time, her sense of identity had become an extension of his and her individuality and agency are lost as a result. Antonioni attributes this dissonance of identity to the alienating effects of modernity and its dissolving effect on humanity’s moral fabric.

Mirrors also recur as a motif throughout the film, casting Giovanni and Lidia as elusive ghostly figures like incomplete versions of their former selves. This idea is further reinforced through the surrounding modernist anti-romantic architecture of Milan, which seemingly has the pervading effect of mounding people into the same despondency and indifference.

The despairing world of “La Notte” is a suffocating existence that condemns modernity to an unavoidable disease of complacency and deceit. The film is an intricate inspection into the rootlessness of the modern man, the indifference of romance and the enigmatic confines people unconsciously construct around themselves and their partners.

Published on March 3, 2021 at 10:39 pm