La Notte [Masters of Cinema] [1961] [DVD]

Second in Antonioni's trilogy of black and white films. This one depicts a married couple Moreau and Mastrianni who cannot communicate, although they cannot separate too. He is a writer, an intellectual, who is exhausted with his life and his writing. When he says to his wife an ill women in hospital kissed him, she merely says he can use it in a novel. We spend a whole day and night in the company of this couple, alone or apart. The film is about alienation and uncertainty. As Valentinna(Vitti) says," When I try to communicate, love goes". Antonioni uses the dynamics of architecture, its verticals, horizontals and diagonals to show the backdrop to a world in transition between the old and new. He shows elements too of the modern world,helicopters, rockets, book openings, house parties. Lidia( Moreau) goes on solitary walks around the streets, talking to a distressed young girl, stopping street fights,looking at young men setting off rockets in a field. Through her reactions we get some sense of her personality. As a couple they turn up at book signings and parties or watch performers dance as if they are onlookers to their own lives. They have no language for their inner lives. They make gestures that go nowhere. They drift in a somnambulistic state. Giovanni attracts a wealthy businessman with his talents but feels he is selling out. His wife has her own source of wealth and is indifferent to his ability. Their relationship is captured by an image of a cat looking at a statue.How can they express their love or lack of it. Lidia is aware of how her husband used to feel. She reminds him by reading one of his letters to her on a golf course next morning. He smothers the truth by groping her in desperation and attempting to make love to her. The film literally ends up with them holed in a bunker.

Masters of Cinema's UK region-free PAL DVD of Michaelangelo Antonioni's La Notte may not have many extras (just a trailer and a detailed booklet) but it has marvellous picture quality that puts Fox-Lorber's previous US release to shame - it looks like it was shot yesterday, which is just as well since the visuals are so important.

Surprisingly accessible, it's one of the great films about architecture - not just the architecture of a city in transition but the emotional architecture of a relationship in quiet crisis. There's a real attention to the shape of things, with clear, clean lines that people never quite fit in. For much of the film Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau are constantly separated even when sharing the same frame while in some scenes it is hard to tell what is the reflection and what is the real image, consigning characters to a virtual visual limbo, ghosts haunting their own empty lives.

It defines the state of their relationship in much the same way that Anthony Mann's films use the landscape to define character rather than just to create an environment, going further to offer a state of the nation address. Moreau is part of an Italy that's being torn down and discarded: Mastroianni is drifting towards a post-war modernity where conspicuous wealth and angular concrete, steel and glass design create a kind of anonymous gilded inertia where trivia surpasses real heartfelt connection with people or the past. The relationship is in its last gasps, occupying a kind of wasteland awaiting redevelopment: the scene with Moreau dispassionately reading a love letter filled with powerful and passionate emotions that Mastroianni has forgotten he ever had (he doesn't even remember who wrote the letter) is a killer.

Besides, the film comes highly recommended in the end credits of Monty Python's Life of Brian ('If you have enjoyed this film, why not go and see La Notte?'), so you know it's worth it!

I must say this is a beautiful black and white film. Antonioni made several films in this era which are among the best films ever made. The black and White night photography here is marvellous. I have a criticism of the DVD though: the subtitles switch to the top of the screen a couple of times, which makes it harder to read and watch the film at these points. This doesn't happen often though. Also the booklet is thick but so far I can't find out who the saxophone player at the party was. Otherwise a fine print of a wonderful film.