La Notte

La Notte (1961) is Michelangelo Antonioni's drama, available to watch online on iFILM. It follows a single day and night in the marriage of a Milanese couple who look successful and feel hollow. Morning finds them at a hospital, visiting a dying friend.

Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) is a fashionable novelist whose new book has just landed. Words come easily to him; feeling does not. His wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) slips away from the launch party alone and wanders the edges of the city, past construction sites and empty lots, in one of cinema's great silent walks. By night both end up at a lavish villa party, where Giovanni drifts toward young Valentina, played by Monica Vitti. Before dawn, the thing they have both known for a long time finally gets said out loud.

This is the middle film of Antonioni's loose trilogy on alienation, between L'Avventura and L'Eclisse, and it took the Golden Bear at Berlin. Watch for a young Umberto Eco in a brief appearance. Plot is almost beside the point here; the architecture carries the mood more than the dialogue does. One for admirers of slow, image-driven European art cinema. Stream La Notte (1961) online on iFILM.