La Notte 4K 1961

The saying that no man is an island is essentially a lie. People are islands, and between them lies a bottomless void. The rickety bridges they build between each other quickly decay and wear out, and in the end, loneliness remains. Lonely people in lonely families live on their own and die alone. And you can blame the era of uncommunicativeness as much as you like, which—paradoxically!—is exacerbated by the emergence of ever new ways and means of communication, but that's not the point. Love becomes a habit, and the happiness of having a loved one by your side sooner or later turns into a desire to be alone.

Giovanni and Lydia have been married for a long time, their life is settled, everything is calm and normal. Everything is like everyone else's. Once upon a time, it could have been called love. Now it's just married life. The serious illness of their friend suddenly turns out to be the very first domino that, once it falls, is capable of bringing down the entire structure. And if Giovanni, in the emptiness surrounding him, could not hear for whom the bell tolled, then Lydia, perhaps not yet realizing that everything had changed, already felt it with certainty. She wants to run away, shut herself off, understand. She returns to the place where she was once happy with Giovanni, but even though everything there remains the same, she herself has changed. Lydia does not want to stay alone with her husband in the apartment and goes with him to a party, hoping that there she will be able to forget herself. But morning inevitably arrives, and with it the realization that the irreparable has already happened and nothing can be changed.

There are many films about how the ship of dreams tears its belly on the reefs of reality. But no one has made this catastrophe as mundane and at the same time as devastating as Antonioni. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau do without hysterics and emotional outbursts; La Notte proceeds very smoothly, measuredly, as if emphasizing the fading of the characters' feelings. And when dawn finally comes, everything becomes clear by itself. Gone are the days when scandal and breaking dishes, like electric shocks, could revive what still had life in it. Now there is no point in this, just as there is no point in looking for the right and the wrong, and trying to catch up with the elusive past with desperate kisses. It's the end.

Michelangelo Antonioni erects walls of misunderstanding between the characters, and each of their dialogues hits these walls and slides down them into emptiness. Giovanni tries to fill this void with social parties and casual lovers, creating the illusion of moving forward. Although in reality, he has long been in a state of stagnation, in a deep creative and personal crisis. Lydia, on the other hand, absorbs this emptiness into herself, merging with it until she realizes that she has nothing else left. The director is ruthless with his characters: he empties them, forcing them to look back at the last minute to reflect even more fully on the hopelessness of the present.

What happened, where did they miss the moment when something finally broke? In fact, it's simple. What always happens happened. Life. It's a very universal story. And if someone looks back on their marriage and realizes that something is wrong, then Antonioni is right again, and all that remains is to hope that it's not too late to change everything.