La Notte is about a night… obviously. But the film is actually about an entire day and night, which if expressed with enough imagination and insight is really all the amount of time that one needs to explore many of the complexities of our lives. Antonioni is one of a few artists that has the ability to do that, and using the technology of imagery he sketches a brutal portrait of lives without connection, without meaning, hollowed out from the inside.
Appropriately then, the day begins with death, or rather the nearness of death. A husband and wife go to visit a dying friend in the hospital. Champagne is served and brave words are expressed. As they leave, a wild dark-haired girl afflicted with a madness born of need and loneliness seduces the husband into her room by asking him for a match, and then blowing it out.
Then there is a book-signing party for the husband, and for the wife a lonely walk through the city filled with empty symbols and alienating architecture,
a half-hearted reconciliation, a cocktail lounge with a stunning dance routine that somehow fails to impress them,
and finally a night-time dinner party with more temptation.
Husband and wife eventually find each other again as the dinner party welcomes the dawn; they sit on an open field draped with dew. She reads a love letter he wrote her; he does not remember writing it. They try to make love on the grass. And the film ends…
So, after this day and night what are we left with? A couple in total disintegration, a city that gives no solace, temptations that lead nowhere, and an empty field at dawn.
But goddamn... when that crazed little vixen blows out that match, in one of the most brilliant moves of seduction I have ever seen, she makes all the suffering and emptiness disappear... if only for a moment. In a world with no meaning,it seems insanity and conquest are the only games worth playing.
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