Michelangelo Antonioni’s Milanese marital drama uses sleek, geometric compositions to reflect the modernist couple and the city at its centre.
This feature is the third in our summer series, La Dolce Vita: A Celebration of Italian Screen Style, in partnership with Disaronno.
La Notte, the midpoint of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “alienation trilogy”, depicts an existential crisis that is only made more explicit by the film’s gleaming surface. This iconic 1961 film captures, over a day and a night in Milan, the death of a marriage, the dubious reinvention of a city – and a glimpse of the end of the world.
Marcello Mastroianni plays Giovanni, a successful novelist, apparently implacable, coolly kitted out in a black suit and tie. Jeanne Moreau plays his disillusioned wife, with a terrible thought she daren’t express hovering above her head.
The film starts when they visit a dying friend in hospital: Tommaso (Bernhard Wicki) is a liberal writer who is far more politically committed than Giovanni, and also in love with Lidia. For both husband and wife he represents the road not taken, one that is now about to close.
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They return home to their sleek modern apartment, visit the rundown streets where they lived as newlyweds, attend a book launch, visit a jazz club and finally join a party thrown by a wealthy industrialist on the outskirts of the city. As the band plays on through the night, the capitalist worries that his way of life is coming to an end.
Tension, both sexual and melancholic, pulls at the air between Giovanni and Lidia, who drift through the city as the image of a perfect couple, while their marriage shatters in their hands. Antonioni captures the disconnected lovers and their city in sleek, geometric compositions, echoing the clean lines of their wardrobe.
Those costumes are by Biki, the couturier best known for dressing the diva Maria Callas. Lidia’s two outfits, the white sundress and jacket printed with flowers, and the black cocktail dress with the floral lace shrug form meticulous negative impressions of each other. Hers is a carefully cultivated glamour (an old schoolfriend bluntly points out that she “used to be so plain”), which reflects the constructions of elegance that dominate the film: the bourgeois party, the modernist apartment. She exists in the point where chic meets respectable class conformity.
Pointedly, the two women with whom Giovanni strays wear outfits that echo Lidia’s. First embroidered florals on the long black gown worn by a histrionic patient in the hospital, then the chic black dress worn by an unstable woman named Valentina (Monica Vitti in a brunette wig) at the party. When Lidia removes her lace cape, the two women suddenly match, down to their short, dark hair. Lidia has anointed her own successor.
As Tommaso says in his hospital bed, “Sometimes beauty can be really depressing.” Their sophisticated world’s façade of elegance is shown to be fragile, as for Lidia, life in the shadow of a celebrity has drained her life of meaning. Outside their home, the architectural heritage of Milan is being swept away in favour of less substantial replacements, including the couple’s airless flat.
In an instant, a shower of rain sends the party guests scattering: losing their poise, they throw themselves (in their designer gowns), into the swimming pool. One woman rubs herself against a statue of Pan, an absurd image of frenzied decadence.
At the film’s sorrowful conclusion Giovanni and Lidia embrace, isolated in the modern, artificial landscape of the rich man’s golf course: Adam and Eve in a false Eden, all too neat and new.
To find out more about Disaronno’s 500-year anniversary* celebrations, visit disaronno.com, and join us at Regent Street Cinema on July 4 and 5 for special free screenings of The Great Beauty and La Notte, with complimentary cocktails from Disaronno.
*1525: The legend of Disaronno begins.
