Short Take: La notte

Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte has an aching melancholy that turns shattering. It's a portrait of a failing marriage over the course of about a day. It begins with a hospital visit with a terminally ill family friend, and ends with an all-night party at a wealthy industrialist's estate. Marcello Mastroianni plays the husband. He's a successful novelist whose passion for his career is drying up, and it's rotting out his rapport with his upper-class wife (Jeanne Moreau). All that engages him are prospects for sex: a disturbed young woman (Maria Pia Luzi) he encounters in the hospital; a beautiful, intelligent young socialite (Monica Vitti) at the party; and even his wife when she tells him things he can't bear to hear. The film, though, is at its richest when the wife is central, not the husband. The most imaginative sequence is her trek through town after an argument with him. It's a marvelous allegory of nostalgia for her younger days--impulsive childhood pleasures, flirting with random men, and so forth--that ends with her visiting the neighborhood where the couple had their first home. The area is now dilapidated, and she recognizes there's no going back. The most powerful moment is the picture's climax, when, through the wife's reference to past days, the full extent of the husband's dissociation from both his writing and his marriage is revealed. The scene is one of the most devastating in all of film, and Jeanne Moreau's moody elegance has never been more compelling. Mastroianni is the picture's weakest aspect; his performance barely registers. Monica Vitti and the other supporting players complement Moreau much better. Antonioni's masterful command of staging and shot composition is on fine display, and he and cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo give the proceedings a glamorously decadent look. Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli collaborated with Antonioni on the screenplay.