La Notte Blu-ray Review

• 7th Oct 2013

Eureka!’s Masters of Cinema series always comes up trumps when releasing classic films from the canon of film history by some of the great directors. However, Michelangelo Antonioni is something of an enigma. One of the standout art house film directors of the 1960s he undoubtedly stands alongside the likes of Luis Buñuel, Pasolini, Visconti, Fellini and Jean-Paul Godard. But even the critics have sometimes had trouble recognizing Antonioni until many years later. He is, in Britain at any rate best known for one of the landmark swinging sixties films Blow Up (1966) but he burst onto the European art house scene a few years earlier with an early feature, L’Avventura (1960) about a group of friends on a sailing holiday around Sicily when one of their number inexplicably goes missing. The film divided the critics, some of whom found it too self indulgent.

La Notte was Antonioni’s follow-up film to L’Avventura – not in the characters but in the themes and as such forms part of a triad of films that also included L’Eclisse made the following year. Like L’Avventura, La Notte deals with the pain and hardships of emotions in relationships, the fights and mental struggles that develop in relationships. This film deals with the deteriorating relationship of a couple who over the course of one day appear to be breaking apart. It opens with Giovanni (Marcello Mastroiani) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) arriving at a Milan hospital where their friend (Bernhard Wicki) is dying of cancer. The pair handles the difficulty of this situation in differing ways; Giovanni is stoic while Lidia is very saddened. Leaving the hospital Lidia waits outside upset, while her husband is busked off into a room by another patient who appears to be suffering from nymphomania and seduces him. Later Giovanni tells his wife what happened and she is coolly dismissive of this. When they arrive at a book launch party of his, she disappears and walks round the crumbling ruins of the city (all around there is also construction, a recurring motif in the film) in a long, yet fascinating scene. The slow pace of this scene seems to be externalizing what is going on internally with Lidia – the crumbling ruins of their relationship, a crying child who appears lost as well as plenty of phallic shots of bollards and firework rockets firing into the sky. Later the pair’s relationship deteriorates further at a party they are invited too.

If you’re expecting entertainment, there isn’t much in most of Antonioni’s films; they move at a very slow and mannered pace – but if you’re in it for a search into the human soul or the pain of relationships then this is for you. Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are rewarding if the viewer is prepared to wait, like a slow burner, for the dénouement then it’ll pay off. The cityscape is equally the star of the film with the opening credits without music taken from a crane lift rising above a construction site over the old Milan (at the time the perfect city to film this) beautifully shot in black and white by Gianni di Venanzo, while out of the window of the modern hospital can be seen old Milan with a very Venetian looking building opposite. And what two giants of sixties European cinema: the very cool Mastroianni (few were cooler or more representative of Italian style than he) and Jeanne Moreau who the following year would star in the hugely successful Jules et Jim.

There are no noteworthy extras on the Blu-ray disc other than the 56 page booklet that sadly was not available for review.

Chris Hick