“La Notte” – Picture of the Contemporary Crisis
Title: “La Notte”
Release Date: 1961
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti
“La Notte” by Michelangelo Antonioni, together with the earlier “L’Avventura” (1960) and the later “L’Eclisse” (1961), forms a famous trilogy in which the Italian director describes the spiritual condition of modern man. The characters, trapped in a modern urban landscape and an elite environment, suffer from inner emptiness, boredom, and a lack of love. Equipped with a range of useful tools, such as financial prosperity, impeccable manners, and cultural reading, they are unable to cope with their inner crisis, desperately seeking salvation from mental catastrophe. The characters on the verge of personal and marital stagnation are played here by the beautiful Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni.
Antonioni’s “La Notte” – against the plot
“La Notte” is one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films in which the plot does not play a significant role and is seriously reduced in favor of searching for the hidden meaning of the images. The main characters are Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) – a married couple with ten years of experience, who live in a comfortable apartment in Milan. They are well-off, and Giovanni is a famous writer who has just published his best book to date. The couple visits their friend Tomasso, who is dying of cancer, in the hospital. After the shocking visit, Giovanni succumbs to the erotic advances of an unstable hospital patient, and Lidia sets off on a long walk around the city, visiting places from her youth.
In the evening, they attend a book launch party organized by billionaires named Gherardini. Lidia keeps to herself the whole time, and in the evening, when she calls the hospital, she learns of her friend’s death. Giovanni, in turn, tries to seduce the beautiful Valentina (Monica Vitti), the daughter of the party host. Lidia also has her own admirer, but she cannot bring herself to betray her husband. In the morning, they both leave, and while walking through the park, Lidia confesses to her husband that she no longer loves him. She also reads Giovanni his old love letter to her, which he does not recognize. The man desperately does not want to let his wife go and convinces her to have sex with him.
Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti, or femininity in Antonioni’s “La Notte”
At the center of “La Notte” as in Antonioni’s other films, is a woman. She is a kind of medium for the processes taking place in the world depicted. Here, the woman is a more emotional being, yet at the same time endowed with an almost metaphysical view of reality. Lidia instinctively senses that her marriage has become an empty form, devoid of love. That is why she embarks on a journey that takes her back to the past, to the place where it all began. It is also significant that Lidia goes to the outskirts of the city, far from the affluent center of Milan, because she subconsciously feels that the trap of the crisis lies in the enslaving bourgeois world.
Moreover, unlike Giovanni, Lidia in “La Notte” has the courage to name and face the poor state of their relationship. In a sense, she herself provokes situations in which Giovanni can establish relationships with other women in order to observe her own reaction. She is shocked by her indifference to her husband’s erotic excesses. What he may treat as a kind of mutual understanding, she sees as glaring evidence of the end of love. The heroine clearly sees the inner emptiness and boredom that prevails in their marriage.
Life experience gives Lidia a certain advantage over the other female character played by Monica Vitti. Valentina is a young girl who does not yet understand the depressive sadness that overwhelms her. She senses the shallowness of interpersonal relationships, but is not yet able to name it, and what is more, she believes in love, as evidenced by her disappointment when she learns that Giovanni is married. She then tells him to return to his wife, and when she discovers their mutual indifference to betrayal, she declares that she is disgusted by them.
Mastroianni and Antonioni’s vision of masculinity
Antonioni portrays masculinity in a completely different way in “La Notte”. Giovanni, despite being an educated and cultured representative of the elite, perfectly embodies the Italian macho type. The superficial nature of the intellectual side of his personality is revealed at the beginning of the film, when the protagonist leaves the hospital room of his dying friend and immediately succumbs to the sexual provocation of a clearly mentally ill patient. Giovanni is primarily guided by instinct in his relationships with women.
He does not form deeper relationships; women are merely interchangeable sexual objects to him, not sentient individuals with whom he can form a personal and unique bond of exclusivity. This is most clearly demonstrated in the final scenes of “La Notte”, when Lidia reads him a love letter. Giovanni asks who wrote it – he does not recognize not only his feelings from years ago, but also the image of his own wife that emerges from the description. For him, femininity is a faceless object, a physical phenomenon that he needs but does not truly love.
“La Notte” and the illness of the modern world
It is no coincidence that Antonioni’s “La Notte” begins with the image of Pontich’s friend in agony. It can be seen as a metaphor for the illness of the modern world and the death of the old value system. Man has irretrievably lost his connection with the past, symbolized by the modern architecture that is omnipresent in the movie. The big-city landscape has, in a sense, absorbed the individual, which is emphasized by the method of composing the frame – bringing the characters together with the buildings. At the same time, the cinematography draws attention to the isolation of the characters, who are rarely shown together – most often we see sharp cuts between shots – separating people by elements of architecture or interior design.
The dominant emotional state of the characters in “La Notte” is boredom, which causes them to seek out ever-changing forms of entertainment. This is particularly emphasized by the white, bright colors, which evoke associations with emptiness and a sense of lack. What is more, this is a state that cannot be overcome; it is not alleviated by learned conversations and reading, lavish parties, or sex. We are dealing with a repulsive image of the wealthy elite: the lack of worldly concerns goes hand in hand with a terrifying emptiness and lack of motivation. A life devoid of authentic love—that is, a personal, affectionate relationship with another human being—makes it an unbearable journey without a destination.
This makes the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “La Notte” all the more significant in this context. The protagonists, although aware of their mutual emotional exhaustion, decide to stay together despite everything. Their desperate final erotic act reveals a desire for love, which is the only thing keeping them alive. Perhaps, then, it is precisely in the hunger to give meaning to existence that Antonioni sees a chance to overcome the contemporary crisis of values.