La Notte

A talented but callow novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) enjoys the acclaim afforded his just-published novel, while his marriage to a well-to-do Milanese woman (Jeanne Moreau) deteriorates. As she grieves for a dying friend she once loved, he is both bemused by and attracted to the advances of other women, particularly the ravishing daughter (Monica Vitti) of a potential new benefactor. An empty evening of visiting decrepit neighborhoods, exotic nightclubs, and a swanky villa party leads to a final confrontation, which reveals the somber truth that love does not always conquer all. The second film in a famous trilogy by the legendary director Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, L'Eclisse), La Notte captures the intoxicating glamour and amorality of Italy's post-war nuovi ricchi, now even more sumptuous in a new restoration from a 4K scan of a 35mm fine-grain.

Awards and Nominations:
Golden Bear (Berlin Film Festival, 1961)
Best Director (Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, 1962)
Best Score (Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, 1962)
Best Supporting Actress - Monica Vitti (Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, 1962)

“The real beauty of the film, the real depth of its intelligence, continues to lie in the clarity of the montage — the way the world is revealed to us moment by moment. The camera’s delicate interactive grace, participating with the fluidity of the characters’ changing points of view, is profound in itself.”
– Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema

“[Antonioni] made his beautiful, skeptical, ironic muse Monica Vitti the arthouse pin-up of the 1960s and created a new Italian cinema – cool, oblique, Marxist – to succeed Neo-Realism. ANTONIONI NEVER MADE ANYTHING BETTER… CINEMA WAS NEVER THE SAME AGAIN.” – Philip French, The Guardian

“THE MOST MOVING PART OF ANTONIONI’S TRILOGY! Because they are married, and because they are Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau—above all, because she is Moreau—La Notte is the gravest movement in Antonioni’s trilogy, the one with L’Avventura and L’Eclisse as its wings…. Moreau’s abandoned face is one of the great images of twentieth-century disaster.” – David Thomson

“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.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker