Critics reviews

Though the film takes place over a short period of time, you feel that the infinite is expressed in that one night. The elegance, the style, the decadence, and the existential crisis of everyone on-screen—all of those elements are so powerful when they are combined. There’s an intensity that can be generated by compressing the time frame of a film, and La notte is one of the great examples of that.

Like Lidia, La Notte is externally placid yet bubbling with unrealized dread, sorrow, and sexuality. It's a muted siren of a movie.

Easy to parody, impossible to replicate, what Andrew Sarris called "Antoniennui"—glamorous European movie stars composed in tableaux in front of brutalist architecture, speaking past each other in existential aphorisms—can be embraced as a Marxist-influence tract on the alienation of contemporary life or snorted at as chic pretention, equal and opposite visceral reactions to ambitious modern aesthetics which in either case and for better and worse say more about you than about the film.

Antonioni offers us big issues to contemplate. What have humans made of the earth? How do we love one another? What is the value of women, art and love in a world defined by men of commerce? Can we wake from our sleepwalking? These are but a few of the questions raised by La notte, a masterwork that only gets better with time, provoking a wakeful regenerative response to 21st century consumption, devaluation of Eros, and our reckless destruction of the natural world.

Antonioni's most emotionally acute and devastating deconstruction of the interpersonal travails of the bourgeoisie, the film remains at once the most bracingly concrete and amorously diffuse of the director's—for lack of a better word—structuralist period.

La Notte reaches its emotional peak during the early, largely wordless sequence in which Lidia just walks around, visibly distressed by both the state of her sick friend and the state of her loveless marriage. Antonioni will cut from a long shot of Lidia wearily leaning against a lamppost to a low-angle close-up of her half-circling it to face the camera, and the juxtaposition somehow conveys more than pages of dialogue could.

The world of La notte isn't an absurd or meaningless one; it's one that hides its profoundest meaning in plain sight, that owes its almost incalculable profundity to the immediacy of its visual patterns and abstractions, and that Antonioni both damns and redeems in the same gesture, the same moment, by means of his own art.

There's nothing driving the action, save maybe for time—the boozy night is pressing inexorably toward a morning hangover. The substance of La Notte is owed entirely to Antonioni's intoxicating ambiance, and his stars' ability to speak in looks and gestures more than words.

La Notte, Antonioni's very close follow-up to L'Avventura covers similar territory, though its focus is much more internal—dealing with the disappearance of feeling rather than the physical disappearance of a beloved person. Such a premise is risky, particularly with a filmmaker like Antonioni who relies heavily on visual styling to convey feeling. In this case, he doesn't quite pull it off.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1961 follow-up to L'Avventura—and middle feature in a loose trilogy ending with L'Eclisse—repeats many of the melancholic themes of its predecessor, with particular emphasis on the boredom and atrophied emotions of the rich. The results are somewhat more mixed, though on the whole the performances are better—which may not matter so much in an Antonioni context.

A good example of the evils of continuity, from its opening scene of a deathly sick noble critic being visited by two dear friends. The scene gets off well, but the director carries the thread of it to agonizing length, embarrassing the viewer with dialogue about art that is sophomorically one dimensional...

Only a sequence by sequence analysis could do justice to the supreme plastic beauty of LA NOTTE... One feels that Antonioni is in complete control of the smallest detail. If during the early part of the film Jeanne Moreau is constantly seen flattened against a building in the lower left hand corner of the screen, this is not by accident. It is an expression both of her need for support and her feeling that she has been whirled off centre by the force of the struggle which is going on inside her.