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Essay on The City Of Rome Through La Notte By Michelangelo Antonione
A dour, ponderous film, La Notte depicts a world that is terminally ill. Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) is a novelist losing his desire to write, while his wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), becomes increasingly disaffected with their marriage. The film begins with a high shot of the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of Milan--all sharp corners and sterile surfaces--and ends in a gray sand pit reminiscent of a grave or a desert.
The characters' desolation is expressed more fully through the bleak settings around them than through their own actions and dialogue.
La Notte is the middle film in Michelangelo Antonioni's "trilogy" (Lopate, 1998) of the early 1960's, falling between L'avventura (1960) and L'eclisse (1962; The Eclipse). These works constitute a trilogy not in the sense of maintaining a continuous narrative over the course of three films, but by virtue of consistencies of style, tone, and theme unifying three separate stories filmed consecutively. In this respect, Antonioni's trilogy resembles those of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman.
Among the elements linking L'avventura, La Notte, and The Eclipse are a central plot relationship involving a couple; an upper-middle-class Italian milieu; themes of alienation, failed communication, and the sterility of passion in modern life; and an austere black-and-white visual style, less realistic than that of Antonioni's earlier, more "neorealist" (Lopate, 1998) films but less flamboyant and reflexive than that of his later color films.
The central characters in La Notte are Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni), a successful novelist, and his wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau).
Giovanni is losing his desire to write, while Lidia is becoming increasingly disaffected with their marriage. Set in and around Milan, the story begins with Giovanni and Lidia visiting the hospital where their friend Tommaso Garani (Bernhard Wicki) is dying painfully of a terminal illness. While leaving the hospital, Giovanni complaisantly....
