LOVE IN MODERNITY

       Design in sprawl. Complexity en masse. Landscapes that stretch high and across, peaking to the sky. This is industry, this is the future. This is modernity, and this is how director Michelangelo Antonioni opens his film La Notte (1961): scaffolding and steam and the vast sea of steel and concrete. Layers beneath layers, preceding those within the characters we have yet to meet.  Lofts, bungalows, expressways; in their movement and interconnectedness there is an emptiness, a hollow cave without any climbers or explorers. Though these walls and ceilings of the high-risers seem impenetrable, there need be only one single window to acknowledge its beauty, and the mental notation it creates. Antonioni chooses a window of only about twenty-four hours -- not enough to fully scan the two married people we will follow for the runtime, but enough to create a mental notation -- a notion of lost love in a city finding itself for the first time.

​But you can’t just lose love -- it disintegrates. There’s a decline, a deconstruction of value and sheer pull towards one another. Antonioni paints this with high regard, choosing to deliberately decelerate the pace of the film rather than have a typical climax-denouement structure; the entire film almost plays as one drawn-out denouement, where the drama accentuates itself like the pang of a sustained chord. We have here a man and a woman, married, until death do they part -- but through life do they struggle. Simple enough, really; we’ve certainly grown accustomed at this point of an Italian cinema with character gradients, and even in a glorified Fellini picture, we’re given complexity. Characters are not merely two-dimensional canvases; rather, they are pieces of construction. Of scaffolding. Of rare oversight. What we allow in this way, then, is to portray in art a gradient of story structure, too; our stories are only as compact as our characters, even in their defining disillusionment, and in this way we allow for a different kind of storytelling; that of blank space, that of gaps, not necessarily meant to coerce puzzle pieces to be filled, but rather for observation. The understated truths in gaps illuminate themselves in La Notte. There are gaps in two people who lose each other’s lives, and they need only be recognized.

       There is an urgency to Antonioni’s craft here; clockwork, perhaps. Or perhaps it is another allusion to the speed at which we operate which proves unsustainable in modern society. Or perhaps it is just the nature of these characters, portrayed stunningly by actors who fit the mold. It is only right that Marcello Mastroianni, one of Italy’s grandiose film stars, plays the man, who seems always at internal war over his loyalty to a fading shadow and the lust of a newer light. And equally so for Jeanne Moreau, a woman whose career has been defined by a certain quality of  independence. Women all over Rome want Mastroianni, and she does too, but she doesn’t need him as others believe they might. Over a certain period of time, her realization of this in her performance is what brings viewers back a half-century later. She is, for innumerable reasons, the central heart of La Notte.

       There are moments here, too, that speak volumes to the craft of screenwriters Antonioni and Tonino Guerra. To understand between two people the essential fracture of desire is only created by their own language, to themselves and in their performance. Where the screenwriters succeed here is not in their flaunting or exposing of habitual wrongs, but instead assembling the individual languages of these characters; of course, Mastroianni and Moreau both are never reduced to body language for mutual expression, and for this the film remains intact, but there is still a distinctive tone of distracted speaking here, where sometimes the sliver of a shadow can illustrate the impulse that the small talk couldn't. There is sheer bleakness in this deafening silence, where one can piece words to each other to stitch a meaning, but to a point, there is an overall intent, and here, we know a conversation's endpoint as we start it. Feeling above or ahead of two characters who cannot keep up with themselves is a frightening thought, but it is an essential one, a needed base. 

       Antonioni gained one of the great records and filmographies of all filmmakers throughout the mid-20th century, and the scholarly notation of most is that he was a minimalist, as you may see with a director like Kiarostami or Satyajit Ray in their respective times. Of course, minimalism often springs into mind the closed-off, one location, physically-stuck low-budgeters, but there’s an equivalent claustrophobia in characters who are trapped beneath themselves, and their own structures. The confines placed on them by family, by friends, by the modern world. The film offers windows inaccessible to the characters’ peers, windows that reveal much more than any of the skyscrapers that headline the film. Through these windows that Antonioni builds, one can see the reflection of themselves and how far they’ve come -- or how far they’ve staggered. Whether we are progressing is not of concern; because, in time, all that we once knew will be lost, and the only thing we will have left to build with is the scaffolding and the layers of the modern world. ❖

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