La Notte

1961 [ITALIAN]

Action / Drama

20
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 91% · 31 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 91% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.9/10 10 26165 26.2K

infidelity milan hospital writer socialite party criterion

Plot summary

A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship in Milan.

Director

Michelangelo Antonioni Photo
Michelangelo Antonioni

Top cast

Monica Vitti Photo
Monica Vitti as Valentina Gherardini
Marcello Mastroianni Photo
Marcello Mastroianni as Giovanni Pontano
Jeanne Moreau Photo
Jeanne Moreau as Lidia Pontano
Giansiro Ferrata Photo
Giansiro Ferrata as (uncredited)
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
1.09 GB
1280*682
Italian 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
2 hr 1 min
Seeds 10
2.02 GB
1920*1024
Italian 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
2 hr 1 min
Seeds 31

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by crculver 9 / 10

Loving to depict bourgeois alienation, Antonioni shows here a couple's marriage breaking down, with Monica Vitti as a delightful foil

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni shot a series of films exploring the psychological torment of his bourgeois protagonists. In spite of the wealth and security they established, they had no idea what they wanted in life or what they were supposed to do. In spite of busy social lives, they found it impossible to truly connect with other people. LA NOTTE, from 1961, is one of these, and I think it's the very best of them.As the film opens, one morning in Milano, married couple Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) visit their friend Tomasso (Bernhard Wicki) in the hospital as he lays dying. Lidia is clearly shaken by the experience and, after Giovanni leaves for an appearance to promote his new book, the camera tracks Lidia through a long, aimless walk around Milano as she processes her thoughts. Here Antonioni (anticipating his later film Il Deserto Rosso) shows the drastically changing face of Milano in the postwar construction boom, and the appearance of new tech gadgetry in everyday life, as just one more way people can feel they have nothing certain they can hold on to in this world.Giovanni and Lidia, while never outright squabbling, have clearly grown cold towards each other. Gradually one begins to wonder if there is any life left in their marriage whatsoever. Things come to a head, however, when Giovanni and Lidia go that evening to a party at a rich industrialist's villa, and Antonioni's favourite actress Monica Vitti appears. Vitti's role as a foil to Giovanni and Lidia is powerful and moving, but I think its precise nature should be left unsaid here, as it's better audiences aren't spoiled first.A mere description of the plot might seem like nothing happens in this film besides bored people talking and yet another mid-century European cinematic tale of adultery. But LA NOTTE is a film of incredible visual poetry, almost like the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Even scenes that evoke the characters' boredom are shot as such beautiful tableaux that the viewer is enraptured. Antonioni often shoots his characters reflected in mirrors and the like, and there is some cinematic legerdemain here that just makes you go "wow".Appearing in Antonioni's body of work between two similar films that are often considered a trilogy, LA NOTTE has often got less buzz than its predecessor L'AVVENTURA, with its daring plot twist, or its successor L'ECLISSE with its chic Monica Vitti-Alain Delon love affair. But I think that in terms of the picture-perfect visuals and elegant pacing, LA NOTTE deserves every bit as much praise as those other two classic films.
Reviewed by runamokprods 7 / 10

Distant, beautiful, difficult and absorbing

Challenging and emotionally muted on 1st viewing, I still found this largely a very interesting portrait of a bourgeois marriage crumbling, observed during one afternoon and night. The couple visit a seemingly dying friend in the hospital, attend a book signing for the husband's new novel, stop at a nightclub where they barely even react to an erotic floor show, and then head to a party for a rich industrialist who is celebrating the first win by his new racehorse, Both Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau do terrific work as the deadened and estranged couple. He no longer even identifies with his own writing, feeling it's just a product, like that made by the industrialist. He's even lost his sense of lust. She no longer feels love for him, and seems locked in loneliness and depression. It's a tough movie to take, grim, humorless, almost as dead feeling as its leads, but that would seem to be the point. My only problem, as I've occasionally had with Antonioni, is that well before the end I felt I had gotten these themes clearly and powerfully, and there was, after that, a certain sense of hammering home ideas that had already been expressed beautifully with a lighter touch (there's a key reveal near the end that I saw coming a mile off). But the images (of course) are striking and memorable, as are the performances, and the sad gloom that hovers over this world of people who seem to have it all, and yet feel so little.
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