Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship in Milan.
Antonioni's La Notte is a masterwork of modernist cinema, using the architecture of Milan and long, meditative takes to externalize emotional alienation. Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau, and Marcello Mastroianni deliver extraordinarily nuanced performances that communicate volumes through restraint. Aldo Scavarda's black-and-white cinematography is stunning, transforming urban Milan into a landscape of existential estrangement. The film is singular in its rejection of conventional dramatic incident — boredom and drift ARE the content. The ending, a devastating act of intimacy that reveals only emptiness, is one of cinema's great conclusions. Plot scores slightly lower as Antonioni deliberately eschews narrative momentum, which is intentional but does reduce conventional dramatic engagement.