La Notte takes L’Avventura’s elaboration of mood (what they call clima over here) and welds it to a disciplined twenty four hour structure. Moreau and Mastroianni make for an impeccably charismatic troubled couple, as the film documents their marriage on the verge of collapse. Cinema in mid-century Italy embraced existential angst with a vigour that even the French can’t claim to match. The French fascination with the rules of form meant they were always more playful than their Italian neighbours, who seem to be perpetually chewing on the hollow bones of affluence. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the Godard film which feels closest in tone to the likes of Antonioni, Fellini et al was shot in Italy.) In La Notte, Antonioni pushes the ennui and angst towards a kind of perfection, a perfection which is conveyed through the cinematography and lighting, where every shot is another element in the couple’s exquisite decadence. It is at once claustrophobic, deadening and brilliant, as is the case of their marriage.
Unfortunately I was teaching on the night of the screening of LÉclisse, the third in this kind-of trilogy. But seeing the first two on consecutive days, you can see how the director had no choice but to gravitate towards colour and the fractal explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point. La Notte would appear to be pushing an aesthetic as far as it can go. Even if there was one more step, the end of this journey, the one he and his characters is on, is clearly nigh. The constrained concerns of the mid twentieth century cannot be masticated for much longer, no matter how beautiful they (and their avatars, Antonioni’s perfect actors) may be. People will soon stop wearing perfect suits, their hair will be a mess, the codes of civilisation will be challenged and overthrown, to an extent. The whole of late twentieth century thought is encapsulated in the films of Antonioni, leading to Jack Nicholson going awol on the edge of the world’s great desert.
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