© 2013 by James Clark
This past year has brought a rich array of films that tackle from various angles the challenge of doing justice to one’s sensibility. In paying homage to these works, I would often recall that past master of presenting the transcendent glow of finite intent, namely, Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s time, I think, to reacquaint ourselves with this consummate, deluxe designer of haunting cinematic anticipation. With so many and varied practitioners in the field now, the brave and virtually solitary researches Antonioni dared to put into play can function as a welcome—even necessary—draft of extremely quiet, extremely direct traction for a métier surging into Surrealist extravaganza (often provoked by Antonioni’s contemporary, the sombre and formidably equipped Dadaist, Robert Bresson.)
I’ve become fascinated in gradually realizing that almost the full complement of this indie—yes—but also guerrilla art has, apparently, been produced by casts and crews expending a remarkable devotedness to the projects, matching that of the often troubled and troubling auteur. Antonioni’s accomplishment, for instance, is inconceivable without the presence of his muse, lover and heaven-sent physiognomy, Monica Vitti. So it was something of a jolt to learn that the film on tap here, La Notte (1961)—where she plays a somewhat minor role—hinged upon two great performers (and specialists, to boot, concerning problematic incident), namely, Marcelo Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, who hated this assignment and did not take seriously the roles they were to sustain. Mastroianni, in particular, already a star due to his memorable work in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, spent quite a bit of time on the set quarrelling with one of the writers of the piece, Tonino Guerra. And that rancor, with its behind-the-scenes clutter, cues our special concern here, regarding the precise nature of Antonioni’s pristine disclosures within complex and even Byzantine involvement by associates, though contrarian with regard to conventional filmmaking, unlikely to have absorbed the unique physicality of his inspiration.
It comes as a surprise to me that the dynamite and seemingly idiosyncratic feature films of the 1960’s—so cinematographic in ways rather akin to (and yet strikingly different from) the work of Bresson—entailed a battery of screenwriting associates, namely, the aforementioned Guerra, along with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. Not only did they figure in much of Antonioni’s output, but they also informed much of the production of Fellini and lesser lights of the golden age of Italian cinema. Bringing to the table training in architecture, theatre, Surrealism and law (and, in the case of Guerra, a stint in a Wartime concentration camp), they would constitute, at an intensive level, skilled and loyal deck hands for the heavy seas Antonioni (himself a graduate in Economics, and a virtuoso violinist in his early years) had in mind. Thus we must take into account a contribution of spadework as to situation and dialogue, leaving the auteurial initiative occupied with that virtuoso spatial musicality which constitutes the heart of his discoveries.
That is not to say that Antonioni would not have been instrumental in this film’s focus upon a literary intellectual coming up empty. He was frequently and emphatically definite about being the final arbiter of every facet of a production (meaning that his great cameraman, Gianni di Vananzo [also the main man for Fellini’s 8 ½] would take his readings in accordance with that fluidity consuming his boss). Hence the opening scene of La Notte, with its two protagonists, Giovanni and Lidia, visiting a friend in the final stages of cancer, who greets them warmly and wittily with, “Come in, my dears…Operation successful but the patient dead,” bristles with metaphorical punch such that its directionality is to be found in the sensual features of its setting, not through having it out in dialogue. That the dying friend, Tommaso, and the less visibly dying visitor, Giovanni, are both professional writers does not anticipate revelations about writing per se, but the unruly, quite lethal infrastructure of such endeavors. Therefore, we have to go into reverse from this moment we could easily be caught up with as launching an exploration of Giovanni’s career. We have to revisit the extensive scoping of the structures of central Milano, during the credits, and during Giovanni and Lidia’s Alfa Romeo gliding into the hospital parking lot; and also their making their way to their friend’s room—punctuated by Tommaso crying out, being injected with morphine, told by a doctor, “You’ll feel better now,” and replying in despair, “What will I do?” (He tells them, “With morphine, things seem different.” Later on being hit with a painful downdraft, he complains, “I think they are using water, not morphine.”) While an elevator bell quietly tolls we are sent down a glass facade showing the commercial vicinity of the art deco central railway station, the drift alternately posing a clouded prospect when traversing tinted glass, and much crisper, glittering incident on hitting a vein of full transparency. Ambient electronic music on the soundtrack here insinuates that an unsuspected order of consciousness (a play of gloom and light) is about to be ushered in. Then there is the understated luxury of their car (perhaps insinuating an overly optimistic approach to equilibrium) emerging from shadows and a grotty construction site into a splash of sunlight at the doorway of the hospital and its parking lot. As they walk to that hospital doorway, the couple emit sullenness and disorientation, never regarding one another. The main floor corridor gleams like a deluxe hotel. They rush through it, heads slightly bowed, and into a shadowy elevator where they stand as if strangers briefly enclosed in a public space. Deposited into a corridor that exudes quiet sheen, they are confronted by a beautiful young patient emerging from her room (in a black negligee, once again sustaining the bon vivant initiative) on hearing the elevator. Her hungry comportment toward them accentuates their flaccid and confused response to this entreaty.
Giovanni and Lidia’s torpor seems, at first, more suited to Tommaso’s last stand. But Lidia in particular cannot find her way to anything resembling poise—positioning herself behind his pillow; blurting out, “I told Giovanni not to come!”; refusing to join him in a glass of champagne; and then stiffly excusing herself, “I have to go…See you tomorrow…” The nurse had brought in the bottle, chirping, “It’s stimulating, good for you…” and he had quipped, “Hospitals are like night clubs these days… People want a good time to the end…” And Giovanni, seemingly more inured than Lidia to dead-ends, listens as impassively to his friend’s frantic praise of his new book, “You’re book is the thing that really matters,” as to the confession, “I’m tired of all the pretending… I lacked the courage to probe deeply…” Leaving the lugubrious party—its dividedness the writing team could rifle through all day (there’s even a chopper going by, minus Jesus)—Giovanni is once again waylaid by that young woman not yet physically ravaged by cancer but suffering from its emotional destabilization. She asks for a match, blows it out (part of an enormous metaphorical pattern along lines of hot and cold), and she drags the only slightly recalcitrant writer to her bed where they passionately kiss. The verve of her sharply black negligee against an antiseptic white wall is enough to dissuade us from any literary outcomes, in favor of trying to get a bead upon a cold fish getting fried.
Back with Lidia at the parking lot, they drive away, without a word or even a glance; but the streetscape provides sunlight upon finely textured buildings, and open vistas with healthy foliage. This breath of fresh air hits doldrums in the form of a nasty traffic jam—being adjudicated by a traffic cop, his tropical white uniform and pith helmet no match for the plunge into chilly disappointment (but his striking a silent comic’s peeved attitude of hands on hips offering a tiny whiff of sailing along despite the viscosity). The jam unblocked, there is once again the lilting effect of the well-designed commercial buildings in the district where his publisher is staging a launch party for Giovanni’s latest novel, The Season. (At the point of being bogged down by the traffic but still touched by the previous such uptick, Lidia, thawing out somewhat, urges him [very irritated by the motoring setback] to go through with the reception. She also brushes off his fondling the girl. “Good story material. You could call it ‘The Living and the Dead.’ I’m not outraged. You were taken by surprise. Maybe she’s the lucky one… She’s uncontrollable…”) She’s soon fed up with the phoney hilarity at the publisher’s, and she bails out, en route, as it happens, to another, quite different, launch.
This affluent and celebrated couple find themselves unable to stay on the same preoccupational page of social triumph for more than a few seconds at a time, apparently, by mainstream and by venerable filmic reckoning, a recipe for divorce. Roiling within the 60’s European film tradition of marital massacre, La Notte seems to be another instalment of that hasta la vista. (We are tempted, thereby, to anticipate from the fatality of the outset, a similar overpowering malignancy at the end.) But, as we’ve prepared ourselves to discover, this is not—clever patter notwithstanding—a preoccupational narrative. The almost meteorological quality of their motions (Giovanni’s The Season seemingly stumbling into this) maintains an overtone of intense physical crisis about their experience, far outpacing the wilted insistence, the bathos, of their pursuit of advantage. (Someone at the launch, perhaps dazed by all that free booze, refers to the Nobel Prize weighing upon the gathering. “This is the ante-room of fame. We all wait here.”)
Lidia—after briefly being buoyed by the strange anonymity of the gab-fest—returns to dismay about the implications of her and Giovanni’s progress. Out on the shady side of the sunlit street (immediately providing a carry-over of the acidity of the party, in the form of a man threatening the back of his hand to a woman accompanying him), she becomes more steady amidst a swirl of people who truly mean nothing to her, and thereby provide a spectacle of sentient entities in motion. She observes a chauffeur eating a sausage on a bun and becomes amused by his fixing his gaze upon her. Moving on, she nearly collides with a couple of guys springing out of a doorway, laughing about something. She joins their laughter, and, from the evidence up till now, who could have guessed she had it in her? Having wandered out of the solvency zone and come to a partially collapsed building with hoarding around it she goes into its courtyard where an impoverished toddler is crying her eyes out. Lidia tries to comfort her and, finding that impossible, runs her fingers across a beautifully corroded metal component of the house of tears. (Counterpointing her following the sun in this way, there is Giovanni coming to their toney [white-marbled] building, neatly packaged amidst quietly ambitious residential apartment gems, entering their heavily shadowed, art museum-like home [a large, incongruous nude painting in his office/library], and falling asleep, all the curtains drawn.) We next see her from a distance, walking toward a big, blank, light colored wall (the cut edited in such a way as to trip us up in supposing she is in the vicinity of her husband’s night-time), posing her body’s presence against its mass, then, from middle-distance, she’s at a street corner, leaning against a light standard. The next step comprises her getting out of a cab at the outskirts of the City—semi-rural, with some rustic structures having been overtaken by the urban energies she’s attempting to put in their place. After a short walk exposing some ragged and somehow vivid long perspectives, she comes upon a gang of late teen-aged boys, two of whom are having a fist fight. One soon gains the advantage, savagely smashing the other’s face as he lies on the ground. Lidia screams, “Enough! Enough!” and the fight ends. She runs away from the attentions of the winner, and becomes quietened by streetlights coming on, their white intensity burning into the dull white twilight. Then she attends the other launch, rockets being sent skyward by young guys less violent than those just seen. One of them enthuses, “The wind’s strong up there!” The camera follows the corkscrew trail of grey smoke, dashing across a low-wattage sky. The whoosh of the propulsion, and a big white cloud settling over the farmer’s field, shrouding the blasters, moves her to call Giovanni, who, on waking up, had rattled around the balcony—unmoved by what the prospects offer—and slumped into his bunker-like office. Her voice is animated, and she remarks the goings on at her launch gala. “Kids are still firing rockets! You’ll like it! They shoot up ever so high!” She adds, “The same old field…” and therewith we see clearly that they began their now-largely-trying association with some purchase upon the “uncontrollable.” He parks his perfect car at a gritty yard with a wonky gelato stand emitting rural-sounding Italian folk-music. “Why come here?” he asks.
Straightaway the arteries get clogged again. He notices a railway track overrun with weeds. “This was in service when we lived here,” he notes. Warming a bit to the crusty atmosphere, he observes, “It hasn’t changed.” “It soon will,” Lidia retorts, clearly having misplaced the forward momentum that overtook her solitude. “The rockets were over there…” Back home, she’s in the bathtub, asking him to bring a sponge. He mechanically drops it by her, and her face and body are crushed. She looks around at him as if she were a scolded child. Such pronounced aggrievedness rips through the rest of the film, providing it with the facade of a couple’s dysfunctionality as lovers. In view of that tip of the iceberg’s full weight, we need to alert ourselves for the unthinkable—that Lidia and Giovanni’s vanished love and doomed partnership evinces a mysterious resilience. Chaffing at the immobility implicit in his seldom going out, she complains, “I’m tired of staying home…” He proposes accepting an invitation to a party that night by a leading industrialist; but she, resenting the careerist angle latent within that option, nixes that with, “Millionaires collect intellectuals… He picked you.” “Let’s go somewhere by ourselves,” she bids. And there they are, at a nightclub; and there she is, caught up in the paradox of being completely unimpressed by a show of sensual frisson. Easily as evocative as the skyrockets, this is a hybrid performance by a contortionist/stripper (a striking Black woman whose ranges of flesh and warm, lively features are shown to great, disinterested advantage by Vananzo’s camera) balancing a glass of wine on her forehead as she gradually twists and turns to the first of two jazz-pop saxophone progressions we have to tune ourselves to. Lidia, slumped against the wall, does crude little finger puppet dances across their table, and tells him, “Watching you amuses me. Sometimes you seem to put up a front.” The disappointments he delivered to her self-seeking still in play, she prefers bitchy entitlement at the expense of a good time with something to savor. Stung by her spoken, and, especially, unspoken ridicule, he begins with the cogency of his appreciation of the phenomenon, “Look at her. She’s not bad.” But, quickly sensing that clever cynicism is the most efficient means to one-upmanship, he flourishes the snide and facile aphorism, “Life would be tolerably agreeable if it were not for its amusements.” This being the third cocktail event she’s flubbed in the space of a few hours, she targets the maelstrom of her malaise toward the millionaire’s hospitality where, as at the club, there awaits fireworks and labors of love.
There’s also, right off the top, as if to give them another crack at it, another gorgeous black thoroughbred, the host’s daughter’s racehorse, who had that day won on his first outing (another figure who does best as a solo and on the move). Neither Lidia nor Giovanni rise to that occasion, and, in the course of a preliminary stroll around the grounds and edifice, he notices one of his previous books, The Sleepwalkers, left on a window ledge. He sniffs, “Who here would read it?” And thereby the irony, seemingly about their loveless distemper, sets the stage for some glimmers of wakefulness at this protracted hurricane of celebration.
The hostess’ down-to-earth acknowledgement of familiarity with his work—strikingly different from the fawning at the publisher’s, and also more balanced than that of a blonde woman at the party subsequently declaring, “One of the best books ever written…I’m your greatest admirer in Italy”—(after they had approached the quiet front part of the estate with adolescent spleen [“Are they all dead?”/ “Let’s hope so”]) introduces a range of more gracious interpersonal negotiation than Lidia and Giovanni, floundering in face of a daunting test of their generosity, can muster. Three figures coming to prominence at this presumably inferior locale—the host; his daughter; and a guest named Roberto—constructively complicate the protagonists’ entanglement in apparently certain defeat. (This party, with its predictable cynicism and drunken depth charges into a fine pool, also—with Mastroianni and that gentle and hapless blonde [like Mastroianni’s little horse in La Dolce Vita]—has been designed by one of the writer’s here [Ennio Flaiano], who also produced the screenplay for Fellini’s orgy-rife classic. Will we be faked into believing it’s more of the same? Or will we notice how very significantly different this orgy turns out to be?)
The host has invited them because he wants to induce Giovanni to not only produce a history of the firm (in order to elicit more loyalty from the staff) but also to act in the capacity of a chic and well-known public relations director for the conglomerate. In art house circles, such a gambit would be tantamount to wading amidst a school of barracuda. Similarly, the oligarch’s declaration, “I’ve always looked upon my businesses as works of art,” would seem to be comic relief. But, like his wife (and daughter), this is a player who can, amidst what some would call obscene opulence (though the tenor of the rooms and their decor are meant for those having given some thought to what is in their best interests), insist, “I would advise anyone going into business not to be mainly preoccupied with money,” and have the circumspection to make it fly. His motto, “Life is what you make of it with your own resources,” is sustained by a presence which, though far older than Giovanni, emits far more cogent traction, far more attentiveness to his physical resources. “The important thing is to create something that lasts,” he insists. And to emphasize the sense of the difficulty of such endurance, later in the conversation he admits the future is impossible to grasp. He readily meets the crumpled and tentative novelist halfway, in comprehending that a “necessity” is what must drive a literary artist’s life. Lidia, interrupting for once her loose-cannon cruising around the premises (trying to soak up some frisson from the estate and its odd assortment of idlers and schemers), present at the hosts’ effort to get to know them, somewhat snaps out of her funk—perhaps finding some frisson in that “millionaire who collects intellectuals”—and corroborates the tycoon’s recognition of extraordinary purposefulness informing a writer’s existence. (Years ago, she had given that existence a whirl, under the loving tutelage of Tommaso.) “Giovanni would commit suicide if he couldn’t write,” she declares; and in doing so, almost imperceptibly and not fully aware of doing it, she touches one of those she had hoped to find dead. (Coming across her in skirting the periphery of the event, Giovanni had complained, “Why not mix… Why is it you never seem to enjoy yourself?” A natural soloist, she only very rarely sees any point in mixing; and in this she readies us for Valentina, the horse fancier.) Giovanni, also tripped up by the speaker’s unexpected range, wobbles over the line between due modesty and dopey renunciation. “Isn’t writing an antiquated instinct?” (The host, though, also demonstrates at one point how easily ardent resolves [about facing up to an opaque future] unravel to vapidity—“Maybe our privileges will die out. That would be a good thing…”) Giovanni recovers, however, to the point of noting that mainstream business, unlike literature, deals with “real people” (people not emasculated by cultural habits), those who try to rise to “the rhythm of life.”
Lidia encounters Roberto (who had been pointed her way by a childhood friend surfacing at the villa, who asks her, in the vein of having let down the jet set, “Do you still hang around with intellectuals?”) at a point when, a sudden rainstorm cutting short her staging a bit of a launch via the easy-listening band, she had made her way to the diving board during the obligatory lemming run to the pool (but catching her appreciation of that “uncontrollable” storm she envied about the amorous young girl stuck in the cancer ward). He interrupts her taking off her shoes—“Don’t fool about…”—and, responding to the allure of a well-appointed open road, she accompanies him on a drive toward a possibly exciting future. This drive is filmed from outside of the posh car, pelted with rain but allowing us to see Lidia captivated, smiling and laughing as we’ve never seen her with Giovanni. Though she stops short of letting him sweep her off her feet, she has had a taste of going, rapidly, from hell-hole to heaven.
Giovanni not only gets carried away with Valentina, the youngest resident of the palace; but, unlike the episode featuring Roberto, we get to hear (as well as see) what the excitement is about. Whereas the Mastroianni and Moreau input circles about a domestic crisis, when it comes to Valentina, portrayed by Monica Vitti, the heart and soul of Antonioni’s calling, we run into the full brunt of how detached a socially implicated existence can become while still remaining productive. That crack, about what a good thing the end of “privileges” would be, rushes back into our face here, since Valentina’s homeland of untrammelled skepticism requires a level of complete indifference to the generating of money (her father’s bemusing mantra) and to those wedded to getting ahead by means of it. We first see her not from Giovanni’s sightlines but from those of Lidia who, in treading alone through the toney rooms, notices her reading a book (Giovanni’s?) while at the foot of a stairway she’s in no rush to climb. Their eyes meet but there is no connection. A bit later, he comes across her playing with (finessing) inertia in the form of sliding her compact (a rigidly contracted thing) across a checkerboard floor, with a view to touching down at the farthest reaches, the frontiers, of its rigid order. Duly smitten—she having that primal goddess visage and pristine body—he asks if he might join her game, and she tells him he’s too old. “I’ll be younger if I play with you,” is his line (which does, though, speak to his primal volatility). The gulf between them is given an exuberant cinematic twist in his going on to declare, “Frankly, I came here to talk with you…” a gambit which she responds to with a blank face and a return to a kneeling, shooting position, in which her head becomes only partially visible—a missile rather than a conversation partner. He berates her for “acting the cynic” in being indifferent that a ruby earring has gone missing, and soon a mob is horning in on the shuffleboard-like diversion. Giovanni opts out (the magic definitely gone) and she mocks him to the tune that he’s a typical intellectual, only comfortable with losing. He bumps into her father, and the latter’s pitch, “Wouldn’t you like to be independent? [...someday, on the basis of the big bucks I’m offering]” Getting back to Valentina, alone once more in a secluded courtyard, Giovanni kisses her and she kisses him back, watched by Lidia from an upper window. She tells him, “I think love restricts a person.” He admits his work has ground to a halt. “I know what to write. But not how to write it.” She plays him a monologue on a tape recorder, the theme of which is silence. She was happy with a garden’s silence, a haven from urban noise. “There are so many words I’d rather not hear… I don’t want useless sounds…” She erases the tape, calling it “drivel,” and declaring, “I’m happy to observe things without having to write.” Then she mentions she’ll be in Florida forthwith, to observe a hurricane with her parents. “I’m going to see Julia,” is her way of referring to the meteorological event making much more sense than any Julia she could talk to. “Whenever I try to communicate, love disappears.”
Her seeming to have discountenanced the slightly reluctant star of the book launch (though he was truly intrigued by her violence toward discursive communication, wanting to hear the tape again) takes a complementary form when, Lidia, getting dried off at Valentina’s bedroom, after the soaking with Roberto, tells her, “You don’t know what it’s like to feel the weight of years in vain…I feel like dying to end this agony.” Giovanni has heard this from the doorway, watching his wife pouring a drink and claiming, “Scotch is the only warmth…” They take their leave, Lidia giving Valentina a kiss and smiling, and they promise to have her over to their place soon. Valentina counters with, “I won’t be back till much later… You’ve exhausted me, the pair of you…”
The final moment, beginning with Lidia and Giovanni reduced, by a shot of the band in the foreground on the patio, playing on in the early morning light, and they almost indiscernible specks in the distance, passing by the villa and headed for the host’s private golf course shrouded in mist and still a vivid presence, offers a subtle take on just how tough (“exhausting”) these walking wounded protagonists are. Catching up with them, we hear Giovanni, firmly locked into his cruising speed, calling the job offer a “joke;” and, similarly, there is Lidia glaring back at the property and hissing, “Do they think their music will improve the day?” They halt their stroll and their body language is a bit grotesque, both of them frozen in slightly hunched over envisioning of a bruising future. Then she goes over her having been a student and lover of Tommaso (whose number she has phoned during the party, only to find he has died), infused by him with a sense of the urgency of literary art. She recalls being swept off her feet by Giovanni, and comes to the point with, “I feel like dying because I no longer love you. And you no longer love me.” He argues, lamely, “That means you still love me.” She, clearly having prepared for this moment of fulsome bathos, takes out a letter, describing her being asleep one morning, her skin “glowing with life.” The text goes on to attempt making the Platonic case (and her weeping thereby) that her image at that moment “would always be mine.” “I wanted something no one could take from me, mine alone… this eternal image of you. Beyond your face I saw a pure, beautiful vision…How miraculous, to feel that you had always been mine, that this night would go on forever, we would remain like this all through our life, in a way that nothing could destroy.” He, of course, would ask, “Who wrote this?” And she, of course, would reply with gloomy satisfaction, “You.” These (usually) tiny figures, forever being blindsided by the hurricane of viable and finite power—she had phrased her time with Tommaso as being made to feel “clever”—are seated at a sand trap and he embraces her, unwittingly countering their wordiness and its banality. She protests, “No! I don’t love you anymore! And you don’t love me, either!” But the struggle in the sand soon reveals that another order of love has overtaken them. Her face registers an instance of ecstasy having nothing to do with the Platonic underpinnings of Italian culture. The camera draws back, leaving them not themselves and yet more themselves than ever. Struck by neither an episode of pat futility nor an episode of eternal love, we are left with the weather, the landscape and the half-hearted sax motif.
At one point of their all-night skirmish, Valentina tells Giovanni, “You’re just weak, like me.” Neither is particularly weak, constantly exposing themselves, as they do, to the fiercest of challenges. And the vast difference between the dispositions of each—she overly disconnected, and he overly connected—brings to light specifics of the virulence of that dilemma they live for. As such, this constellation seemingly supplemental to that of the protagonists, poses a very arresting rider: Is privileged disinterestedness like Valentina’s (and her father’s) not an optimal resource at an epoch so in thrall to dismaying advantages? This matter leads us to a close look at the efforts of Antonioni in the wake of the monumental mobilization of La Notte.
