166 - La Notte, 1961, Italy. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

166 - La Notte, 1961, Italy.  Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Giovanni and Lidia have fallen into the sandtrap.

The hazard.

"I don't love you anymore."

"I love you."

She reads him a love letter.

It expresses articulately and with youthful exuberance the love of a man for a woman.

Who wrote that?

You did.

He realizes that he does not recognize or remember it.

He realizes that she keeps it with her, folded up, after all these years.

The Pontanos have just spent the day and night together.

And apart.

They visited their colleague, his mentor, Tommaso, in the hospital.

While there, Giovanni got pulled into the next room by a wild and raving woman.

And let her.

It is never explained why their friend, the intellectual dying of natural causes and in acute pain, rooms next to a woman meant for the psych ward--whose room is indeed completely bare but for the bed--but Antonioni needed it to work for his movie.

The wife comforts the colleague while the husband makes out with the crazy lady next door.

We are not asked to see him as a philanderer or as someone typically given to indulgence but as a partner in a troubled marriage.

Who responds passively to the patient's aggressiveness because he has no reason not to.  Because he has no reasons for anything.

In fact he confesses the incident to Lidia afterwards in the car on the way to the book signing.  And she claims to stay emotionally disengaged because she no longer cares.  Which is of course itself an emotional defense.

They belong to the wandering class.  The generation Antonioni is probing.  Anchorless.  Chartless. Compassless.  Starless.  Sailing without direction.  Without light.  Without a destination.  Bobbing aimlessly on the open sea.

The Night refers not only to this night--the events of the movie--but also to the darkness that has come over their lives.

He has published a book and it is successful.  They go to the book signing and a crowd awaits him.

But she leaves.  And wanders the streets.  From the city to their old neighborhood.  Urban to suburban.  The Antonioni witness.  The Antonioni pedestrian.

She watches a gang fight.  Like her own private viewing of Bernardo versus Riff.  The Sharks versus the Jets in a performance that is not performance.  But real.  And one of the members begins to chase her.

She watches young men launching model rockets in a field of grain.  One onlooker asks another if he would go to the moon.  The other says No.  It is eight years before man would step foot on the moon. And a year-and-a-half before Kennedy's 1962 speech at Rice Stadium.  It is even a few months before Kennedy's May 25 speech before a Joint Session of Congress.  The idea is in the air.

She goes to their old street.  She remembers the past.

When he finishes the book signing he comes to get her.  He does not feel what she feels for their old haunts.  Their memories.

He mentions a party at the Gherardinis.  She asks not to go.  She wants to be together.  Just the two of them.  But then she relents.  They might as well go.  They need something to do.

And the party is the night of the title.

A night of absentminded stimulation.  A halfhearted attack on boredom.  A momentary suspension of ennui.

A night that Giovanni spends with Gherardini's twenty-two-year-old daughter Valentina.

Talking.  Playing a made-up game.  And kissing her.

Valentina says she will not break up a marriage.  Lidia says she no longer cares.

Lidia cares.

And so the marriage slices off the fairway and into the bunker.

Where they sit in the sand and go over his youthful love letter.

"I don't love you anymore," she says to him.

"I love you," he responds.

And somehow we believe him.

Maybe he has a pitching wedge.  Maybe he can get up and down.  On the green.  Pin high.  And save par.

The film ends ambiguously.  The couple ends ambivalently.

But because it ends in the moment of embrace, it is like fast-forwarding a couple of frames and then pausing again on the couple from John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  Instead of being always frozen in the moment just before the kiss, this couple is now always frozen in the moment of the kiss. So where the Keatsian couple remains forever in that space right before climax, the Antonionian couple remains forever in that space of release.  So as long as we stay in this moment, with the Italian word "FIN" moving onto the screen, this couple will be fine.

Just do not move the story forward any more.

But stay fixed in the contained universe of the feature film.  With its beginning, its middle, and its end.

If we do so, then the contained universe of La Notte is the one night.  Always and only.

And we will forever end in the moment of hope.

Perhaps we know better.  But that knowledge remains outside this universe.