La Notte

I had watched L'avventura a long time back, and I remember feeling very very bleak. In keeping with the rules of a trilogy [thou shalt not deviate from the bleakness/happiness etc], La Notte or The night is not entirely different, but unlike L’avventura which relates an event’s impact on people, La Notte focuses on people in events, however misleading the name might be!

There is a certain economy which defies psychological attribution. It is obvious that the story is about two individuals-may be leaning towards Lydia as the viewer feels that the camera sees through her eyes, especially the scenery and backgrounds. The continual industrial imagery with the claustrophobic skyscrapers and the constant search by moving across different places and pausing only to stare at random people only to look away when the eye meets the eye. It embodies her weltanschauung of sorts, and also her vulnerability, a strange aloofness with people with unwillingness to commit.

Psychologically, what does Antonioni attempt to present? It is not the society, it is not the person- may be, it’s two persons or if Tomasso’s death in the course of the movie could be seen as symbolic; a futile attempt to integrate oneself back in the society with all the distances I or you, may personally create. Tomasso looks like a scepter, especially on Lydia’s face, the viewer is spurred, in the morass of meaning making, to think that his dying might have been the impetus for the crisis that the movie explores. For, La Notte does capture life when passing through a crisis and its success lies in a truthful telling of it. 

Marcello Mastroianni plays the intellectual, and he is as suave as in other films of his, perhaps a role underplayed deliberately not unlike the subtle writer in 81/2. Every great actor has a mark that differentiates him from other great actors. For Anatoly Solonitsyn, is his casual charm, for Max Von Sydow it is the suffering etched into his face, for Gunnar Björnstrand  it is his stoicism and similarly, for Mastroianni, it is that he bares his soul and can genuinely look lost. Totally, purposefully and innocuously. But Mastriani is lost on me for this movie, for I am bewitched by the actress-Jeanne Moreau with her beguiling face and sad looks. I cannot decide about her. There is something distasteful about that face, it hides years of age but then it looks so openly and cleverly you are not allowed to judge her while she judges and passes on. She plays the wife with a swiftness which suggests a pre-emptive ending of the story, and in the end of the film when she is smothered by her husband with kisses she cries out that she doesn’t love him anymore, repeating her earlier sentiment only this time it smacks of a peculiar detachment-eager to get away from the scene-but of course he doesn’t stop, and the movie ends there thus drowning her defiance with the greater power of the two in a marriage, or may be, backfiring in a confrontation in to buying a deal you had you decided you don’t want.

 

I don't particularly like the story. My mind is screaming, what a rotten plot, but out of deference to the master, I am just going to say the story didn't go too well toward the end. In a review I read of the movie, the critic praises the imagery in the movie, and all the freudian undercurrents; what with Giovanni getting seduced by a brazen woman right after an intense scene with their dying friend, but it gets stilted with the regular plot line toward the end.

So in the middle of this failing marriage, comes the beautiful Valentina who Giovanni is attracted to and who Lydia doesn't seem to mind. Then there is the other guy who Lydia goes out with and gets wet in the rain, but again these typical foils annoy me so very much :| after all, Monica Vitti is a great actress in her own right, must she have appeased her lover at the time, Antonioni and messed up his beautiful movie? No. She is so superfluous to the movie, with her troubles and tribulations. A little piece, she hesitantly shows Giovanni, is truly the most B.S. I have heard any one utter in a great movie. But, yes, may be that was the point.

I like Antonioni when he is simple like when in the end, Lydia reads out a love letter and Giovanni doesn't remember that he himself had written it. That, that, is a beautiful moment. It is a nice movie with powerful performances from Giovanni and Lydia, standing still as they are, in the middle watching their marriage float away. It is in these movies, that the ending really does not matter, and as with the time in the movie, it only goes forward and more.