The Death of Love in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte

The signs are there from the outset. As Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte begins, novelist Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), are visiting their friend in the hospital. Dying of terminal cancer, Tommaso (Bernhard Wicki) speaks of how he no longer has the energy to put up the front of interest to their circle of friends. He’s happy to spend the time with these two, but no other visitors, please. As Tommaso says, “It’s amazing how tired you get of pretending at a certain point.” When faced with the imminent prospect of mortality, who has the time to waste acting like you give a shit? Life is too short at the end, and far too long up until that point.
This conversation sends Lidia walking out of the hospital rather abruptly, ultimately breaking into tears almost the moment she steps outside. We don’t understand why the encounter has had this much of an impact on her, beyond the obvious emotional toll of seeing a friend in this condition, but soon we’ll learn more of what troubles her. Instead of pursuing his upset wife, Giovanni gets caught up by an encounter in the hospital with another patient—an unwell young woman who pulls him into her room and forces herself on him. Well, “forces” might be too strong a word, as Giovanni clearly lights up with desire at the prospect of taking advantage of this troubled woman.
Driving away from the hospital, Giovanni is racked with guilt and confesses the dalliance to Lidia. However, instead of acknowledging his complicity, his active engagement and manipulation of this young woman’s ailment for his own carnal pleasure, he explains to Lidia that he was attacked and overwhelmed—he had no choice, per his account. To Giovanni’s surprise, his wife isn’t upset by this news. If anything, she seems a little irritated that he even felt the need to tell her. He doesn’t realize that this news is no shock to her. She clocked the young woman as they entered the hospital, and she knows who her husband is at this point in their marriage. She’s already given up.
What follows this is a long stretch of the film where Lidia makes her way on foot through Milan. That great cinematic wanderer, Moreau captures in her expression all of the things we need to feel about Lidia: Her rumination on the lives she could have lived, of the people she feels no connection to, but longs to be in communion with. She observes bodies pressed up against one another, workers taking a break to have a bite to eat, kids shooting off rockets in a field, men inside their homes hard at work. There is a life out here that Lidia longs to be part of, yet Antonioni’s understanding of modern-day disconnection places her at a remove from it all.
Through his persistent gaze on the architecture of Milan, Antonioni makes us one with the city. This begins even before that early visit to Tommaso, with an opening credit sequence set up against a skyscraper. Built in 1958, this is the only skyscraper that existed in Milan at the time, and as we pan down its exterior while the credits play, we see in its reflection the city that Lidia will soon wander. We inhabit this reflective quality as Lidia uses the world around her to ponder her own existence and the gnawing feeling of becoming a mere fixed part of the city without a life of her own.
In one pivotal moment, as Lidia saunters around Milan, she comes across a series of waist-high posts sticking out from the ground. Beginning a game of maneuvering in and out of the posts, she comes across an old woman who is hunched over, standing where a post would be. Lidia weaves in and around this woman as if she were a post herself, an object as rigidly a part of the city as any building she walks past. As she leaves the area, Lidia looks back, holding her eyes on the old woman with a sense of sadness. Will she one day become this woman? Is she her already—an object as lifeless as these posts she moves between?
The crisp, cold modern architecture of the city reflects the façade of her marriage—the facsimile routine of the world she’s become trapped in; one where people don’t say the things they mean, don’t express their feelings and are at all times lying to one another and to themselves. At a certain point, Lidia leaves this area of the city and moves into more dilapidated sections. Seeming remnants of damage done during the war, we see buildings that are decrepit, worn down, peeling and crumbling away. Much like Lidia, these sections of the city are still standing, still in the place they’ve always been and will continue to be, but they have been ruined by history. They’re irreparable. Antonioni shrewdly uses the world around his main character to reflect her inner life—not necessarily how the audience sees her, but how she sees herself.
In La Notte, Lidia is the perpetual observer, and we the observers of the observer. This escalates with the film’s second half, in which Giovanni and Lidia attend a vast villa party with their upper-crust friends. Quickly, the two are separated and spend the night living out experiences emblematic of what their positions in life have become. For Lidia, it’s more wandering, more reflections on her own despair as illuminated by her voyeuristic observations of the party’s other attendees. She walks past an old man who has a young woman uncomfortably pinned up against a wall. “Well… maybe…” she hears the woman say, to which the man replies, “Listen, that answer’s not good enough for me.” Is this an exchange of dialogue she and Giovanni may have once had?