Michelangelo Antonioni, cinema of existential distance (part 6)
A new round of understanding the problem of alienation between the sexes Antonioni undertook in “Night”. I have personally seen this film three times: at fifteen, then four years later, and finally now. It is difficult to remember what made such a big impression on me as a teenager, but, I remember, only Pasolini’s “King Oedipus” was so fond of memory along with “Night”. Now viewing this picture seemed rather tedious, although there are almost no trademark long Antonian mise-en-scenes here, and the installation, although not noticeable, is quite combative. If you do not take into account Monica Vitti, who feels like a fish in water in the Antonian universe, the director decided to take a rather risky step - to incorporate into his aesthetics actors artistically alien to her: Mastroianni, who at that time had already died out in "Sweet Life", and Jeanne Moreau - star of the French "new wave".
Antonioni made the latter deliberately ugly, which is surprising given her charm in Jules and Jim and The Maid's Diary, which were still filmed later. By the way, the famous passages of Jeanne Moreau along the street, captured by her thoughts, is a quote (possibly unconscious) from Louis Malle’s “Lift on the Scaffold”. Mastroianni, on the other hand, plays a devastated intellectual with dead eyes, probably developing his image from Sweet Life. “Night” is one of Antonioni’s most highly artistic films: shooting through mirrors and camera delights in the darkness of the night, but until the characters get to the night party, the film seems to be a set of poorly related episodes (which is only an external effect).
Perhaps Night, along with perhaps only Zabriski Point, is the most consistent proof that Deleuze is right about Antonioni as a critique of morality. In this regard, two episodes are of particular importance: a fight in a poor neighborhood and a black dance in a nightclub. Both of these scenes show how life is bubbling, bubbling with sexuality at the bottom of the social ladder, while at the same time showing the hypocrisy and bigotry of the upper strata of the bourgeoisie. Heroes (especially Lydia) suffer from this discrepancy between the life of their body and the arguments of reason and morality. At the same time, they are always ready to betray and change each other, because they live in a world of extinct feelings, dreaming only of spontaneous combustion.
It is possible that it is the final reading of the letter, quite obviously quoted in the film “Without witnesses” by Mikhalkov, raises “Night” on the same level with Antonioni’s masterpieces, otherwise largely confirming, judging by this picture, the opinion of Lursell about this director as a collector of platitudes. So the first episode is an obvious reference to the mental illnesses of bourgeois intellectualism, unable to reconcile body and soul (and who is?). So the night at the villa, especially in the scene of the rain that began and the subsequent madness of its visitors, is evidence of a storm of hidden emotions by the unhappy consciousness of intellectuals. Is that banal? In some head-on hints, but platitudes are unlikely.
Let us say a few words about Valentine, the heroine of Monica Vitti. This is also a burnt-out personality, a victim of misunderstood morality, however, unlike Lydia, she is cheerful and can joke about her emptiness, turning everything into a game. Lydia and Giovanni are victims of their own feelings, which, like everything in life, pass away. So their final convulsive caresses are akin to the mat of the heroine Nicole Kidman at the end of Kubrick's latest film: they can no longer help by fixing the death of love. “Night” now, when watching Antonioni’s filmography, looks somewhat tedious with the life of the big bourgeoisie, containing social and ethical criticism of it. In any case, Antonioni in this film, as well as in the subsequent “Eclipse” and “Red Desert”, shows himself a prophet of the sexual revolution and the exhaustion of usual models of moral behavior. He is sure that something must come and looks forward to it (and one of the first, along with Richard Lester in “Skill...” captures it in “Photomagnification”).
Another masterpiece by the mastodon director Michelangelo Antonioni tells a meditative psychological story about the problems of the relationship between a man and a woman, vainly trying to preserve the remnants of peaceful coexistence with each other.
The hero of Marcello Mastroianni is a complete egoist who regularly cheats on his wife, even without hiding it from her. The Italian actor, as in the legendary Fellini film Sweet Life, played the role of a talented writer, always insecure in himself and in his work. In fact, this gives rise to his tireless egocentric impulse to do what I want and when I want, spitting on the feelings of others.
His unhappy wife, played by Jeanne Moreau, sees no sense in living together with a man whom she once fell madly in love with. She barely forces herself to smile at others and somewhere in her heart still hopes for a successful outcome of her love story with a hopeless egoist. However, having gathered the last will in the fist, still decides to break the long pseudo-relationship. But does he agree with her decision? .
“Night” is an amazing immersion in a completely different world of cinema, where the author’s thoughts are as attractive and universal as they are deep and mysterious. Such a movie helps to take a strikingly broad look at many questions of human relationships that concern the mind. Although not for the first time it is possible to understand the whole hidden plan of a unique author, yet the presence of such films undoubtedly makes the world a better place both intellectually and spiritually.
Tomb drama with languid Mastroianni, Moreau and Vitti.
A melancholic story of family tragedy. Relationships can die, just as people can go into the night. And this process is already irrevocable (in the interpretation of Antonioni of course).
We're shown a couple of bored intellectuals. She is sad about the past, does not find a place in the present and clings to the illusion of the future. He is sad about the loss of inspiration, forgot about the past, rushes into the present and does not understand what may be in the future.
The dissonance of worlds has also affected relationships. While something still warms in the heart, but when people stop understanding each other, stop communicating and become strangers, it is much worse than new meetings that lead nowhere.
Naturally, the age-old theme of male and female and all the related contradictions cannot be the basis for a complete lack of harmony. But here Antonioni probably also says that in modern (and I think it still is) man, with his cynical and detached attitude, such harmony can only be at the level of instincts. Or a kind of harmony. I personally think that's not the case, in general. But it probably happens quite often.
"There is nothing in my films except what you feel" - according to Michelangelo Antonioni, the mood, emotions and reactions that the viewer experiences while watching are very valuable.
Michelangelo Antonioni is an Italian director who, in his works, was more focused on the contemplativeness of the image, simplifying the action and narrative. In this manner of the author, the melody of incomprehensibility and sterility of the surrounding reality sounds more clearly.
Cinema and triptych.
In the 60s, the filmmaker released a tetralogy of alienation and incommunicability. - "Adventure", 1960; "Night", 1961; "Eclipse", 1962, which combines artistic style and selected themes: existential crisis, misunderstanding between people, powerlessness before the metamorphosis of the external world, spiritual impotence. A person appears to be thinking, chronically lonely and devastated, his relationship with other people is a rabbit hole - a position from which he tries to get out, but delves into it even further.
If we talk about individual artistic style, then the first in this category will be monochrome image, then close-ups, non-standard angular angles, minimalist decoration, a combination of organic and inorganic objects. But, of course, the central driving space in the films are actors: Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Jeanne Moreau, Antonioni's muse - Monica Vitti, who won world fame, thank you for close cooperation with the director.
Night.
The middle film in the unofficial "trilogy of alienation" is "Night" 1961 Among the worthy awards in the treasury of the masterpiece is the main prize of the Berlin Film Festival. Don’t miss the impact this has had on other great filmmakers. Stanley Kubrick listed "Night" as one of his favorite films, and "Lars von Trier" spoke about the tape in a similar way: "It's a magnificent thing with its own unique atmosphere." What is one fog over the golf course? Amazing, peculiar and deeply personal film.
The beauty of the picture in its specific aesthetics: buildings, fog, sky, smoke and other elements are symbols of the expression of visual language, resistance to the vulgarity of everyday speech and the common language of the world. Embodies the picture operator Gianni Di Venanzo, who collaborated in the 50s - 60s with the largest Italian directors ("8 1/2"; "Eclipse"; "Juliet and Spirits").
The secondary role, that is where the place of strangeness, goes to Monica Vitti, and the main role is occupied by Jeanne Moreau, and in the process of viewing you feel that the distribution is built quite logically. Here the heroine of Vitti, a guest at a night party named Valentina, expresses the emptiness of external action and the emptiness of the internal state. She is the face of a lost generation that cannot find spiritual harmony and tires itself with perishable pleasures. Eccentric play, intricate role, great actress.
Moreau in the role of Lydia, like the queen of sadness, looks great, a middle-aged woman grieving for her life, as if she regrets the past and does not understand the present. From the first scene in the hospital, where the couple Lydia and Giovanni visit a friend Tommaso, we learn that in her youth, the woman faced a choice between two men, and it is assumed that now regrets her decision made in favor of Giovanni. Her movement from selection to tenderness led to a love of hopelessness. It seems that she has no feelings for her husband, which seems mutual.
The writer is always alone, and this is obvious when he is alone anthropologically, because the soul can only work in this way, in such a harsh mode for its bearer. The husband of Lydia, performed by perhaps the greatest Italian in cinema, Marcello Mastroianni, wanders in the darks of the creative crisis, but this is his work, writing according to its constitution arranges mental tests for the individual. Being in such a poorly balanced and eternally tense (internal and external) state, the hero does not notice how the painful ease of writing turns into tragedy. However, this condition usually results in personal losses.
The events in the film are typical, natural, widespread. In the center of the plot is a married couple, in a relationship that comes to a deep crisis, when life turns into a meaningless routine, a pleasant, unpleasant and anxious duty. The action begins in the morning with the transition to the night where the climaxing events occur, and the completion comes at dawn. Here it is worth noting that Night, which appears in the title of the film, and if you dig deeper, the light and play with it, become the main and full-fledged characters in the film. The reflection of black and white shades and halftones expresses the experiences, torments and sufferings not only of the heroes, but also of the state of decline of the general faith in life. Looking into the darkness, at the remnant of something degenerate, which was once huge, in the morning, through the thrust of fog, the main characters extinguish heartache, they understand that the misfortune in which they found themselves is common. Illumination does not lend itself to full understanding, does not obey explanation, does not keep within the limits of the eye, hands, thoughts, this sensory reaction, incredibly complex and practically unknowable, is transmitted to the viewer.
The lack of events and dialogues, on the one hand, a form for emphasizing images, on the other, speaks of hopelessness, deadly longing. Authors and performers catastrophize life because it is not clean and beautiful enough - this is the horror of beauty, beauty that occurs in the final frame of the couple's solitude on the lawn, which should cause shock, and therefore contribute to insight and purification.
Enlightenment.
In a harsh and unpoetic reality, life during a crisis of love relationships collapses, and if it does not collapse, it changes for most families - for the worse, for the terrible, for the unknown. The message of the director himself is very optimistic, as Antonioni put it about the film: In general, it is about protecting your feelings very carefully, because the feelings between a man and a woman are what can save the modern world. The paradox of relationships is that in love the most important thing is the opposite, in confrontation, when not only the human soul, but also the world turns inside out. But behind the clouds is always the sun, and behind the night always comes the dawn.
You can look for subtexts in the film "Night", as in any author's work, you can see a double or triple bottom, surrender to intellectual motives, but it is better to enjoy a fantastic atmosphere, which is rarely found in modern cinema. Meta plots are manifested in an absolutely harmonious, visual unity of three films, the development of which is the comprehension of the extraordinary beauty that cannot be expressed in words, but can only be experienced, felt, penetrated.
Antonioni, painted by him a summary of the depth and nature of the human inferno, only testifies to the state of sleep, sunset, disease, insanity. A strange wandering foreboding, in a heavy noir angle, a new 'dolce far niente' of life and a rich night party. It is deliberately alien and cold, relative to the Italian ‘il boom economico’ and the post-war ‘la rinascita’ wave. An attempt to plunge into a sensitive creative presence, the contemplative silence of reflection, dissatisfaction. Stifled by the burden of habit in ordinary life, and imperceptibly hidden behind pleasure in a prosperous, intellectual environment.
With Sorrentino, a much worse scenario, even repeated, will acquire much more colors. Even if they are completely contrived somewhere. Despite all the same “discoveries” and all the same fading, habituation, old age – his “evening” is full of both the noise of an unnecessary holiday and serene search, memories, inspirations, and the morning – bright dining light.
The crisis of the modern world (or looking at its ‘la notte’) in the artistic perception of low, impermanent or lost feelings. Revival yields to the theme of degeneration, a relatively high idea of the price of design, its direction and expression in the art of cinema. Antonioni illuminated the small reality surrounding him, and already such a night was not only the central triptych of alienation of the director himself, according to a similar aesthetic, it was in the middle of another trilogy - somewhere between the "sweet life" Fellini and the "fading light" of Louis Malle.
One of the favorite directors of Italian cinema is Antonio Michelangelo. Each of his films is imbued with a special atmosphere of sensuality and intimacy. We seem to plunge headlong into the world of psychological interweavings of heroes. The director opens the veil of a subtle human soul, bares before the viewer, but does not show until the end. After watching each film leaves us with some understatement and uncertainty, which makes the viewer think about the film after watching it. I think that’s what’s important about the film, that the director should give some aspects of life, show them in a way that touches the person, but not exhaust the topic completely.
The last scene of the characters’ explanation, as well as their embrace in the woods, is the restoration of love and mutual understanding in marriage, or the last point of a relationship, complete alienation?
I want to celebrate the amazing play and cinematic image of Jeanne Moreau. How beautifully and accurately shows the inner emptiness, boredom and alienation from the world of Lydia. aimless wandering around the city among the huge houses that seem to press on her; boredom and apathy at the party. Why is it worth just looking at your husband? Lydia feels that there is no previous relationship between them, she wants to return, wants him to pay attention, look, notice, love, but no way. A view seeking support and understanding, but receiving nothing. Reminiscent of the same alienation of the main character (Monica Vitti) in the film “Red Desert” by the same Michelangelo. Feelings of emptiness, loneliness and need for love unite these heroines. Even their condition is shown similarly through the cityscape. Awesome!
Many people have noticed the similarity of the film with 8 and a Half. Fellini. The creative crisis of a writer and director, even played by the same actor (Marcello Mastroianni). A rushing soul in search of meaning and love, tormented by inner emptiness. In my opinion, Antonio showed the state of the heroes more intimately. Especially in this film, the main theme is still the relationship of the characters, in “8 and a half” – a creative crisis.
In conclusion, I want to add that such films should be watched, because they give an impetus to understanding yourself, your personality, help to understand your own thoughts and feelings, or, conversely, give new food for thought. After all, this is one of the functions of art – transforming and transforming not only the world, but also the human soul.
A day in the life of a married couple. Not a very happy marriage. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
The black and white noir ribbon with deep shadows and contrast is permeated with symbolism and detail. Misunderstanding by the characters of each other is emphasized by the slowness of the narrative, which may seem boring to someone, but it is she who immerses and penetrates.
Actors: not Hollywood at all - play differently, feel different. More open, accessible, understandable. Perfectly worked out second roles and extras – make the film more convincing.
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venantso works wonders. Very unusual multifaceted angles, attention to silhouette lighting and consistency of each scene. In the frame there is only necessary, the rest is in the furnace. Need legs? Fine, cut everything else off. Unconventional? Yeah. Bad? Not at all.
Screenplay: A trio that brought diversity to life for one night. The main focus is on the inner experiences of each character - a personal drama.
My verdict: the movie hooked, the angles remembered. I will watch the other films of this director. If you watch, prepare for a leisurely two hours.
The third film "Pentalology of alienation" Michelangelo Antonioni – “Night” – is inspired by the film “Sweet Life” (1959) by his colleague Federico Fellini (an additional confirmation of which is that in the film “Night” (1961) the main role – tired of the life of an intellectual writer – was performed by Marcello Mastroianni, who played the main role in the film “Sweet Life”). Both films tell about the intellectual elite, the so-called “cream of society”, but if Fellini pays more attention to the relationship between man and society, delves into the problems of the socio-political institution, Antonioni, adhering to his traditional semiotics, pays attention to the inner experiences of specific characters.
Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) is a popular writer who is in the frustration of the creative crisis, Lydia (Jeanne Moreau) is his wife. They move along the line of life without looking back: events change each other, constantly repeating, looping, getting darker, duller and dreary with each circle, as if plunging the characters into the furthest depths of the unconscious, into a “night” sleep, resembling a rather incurable disease, like Tommaso Garrani (Bernhard Wicca) – a friend of Jovanie and Lydia, dying in a hospital bed.
Lydia is fed up with a life of intellectuals devoid of any human routine, a life where memories of the past (dialogue of an abandoned railway track, final reading of a letter) are the only available form of sincerity. She does not want to be at home, so instead of going the usual way, she wraps herself in one place or another; she watches with interest how a group of young people launch fireworks into the air, listens to the conversations of random visitors to the cafe. But at the next night party (for the filming of which, by the way, Antonioni spent 32 days), arranged by Mr. Gherardini, a rich entrepreneur who considers himself a creator like Giovanni, bored, and when Giovanni pays attention to this, asking Lydia the relevant question, instantly begins to show interest, although before that only melancholy walked around and reluctantly communicated with people. Her interest is expected to fade immediately, as Giovanni temporarily forgets about her, meeting at the villa mischievous girl Valentina (Monica Vitti), young, but already disappointed in life; trying to seem cynical, but looking even more confused and to some extent naive. Lydia in the absence of Giovanni, playing with Valentina in a game just invented by her, dances with some young man, and when a powerful shower begins, instantly “cleansing” the yard from people, they evaporate without a trace, excited by a rare moment of sincerity.
A rather depressing existential situation, when a seemingly ideal life, where there is a place for sincere love, universal recognition and respect, wealth, turns out to be a vicious circle, the first passage through which delivers indescribable moral satisfaction, but the more you wander through it, the more you want to escape from there. Only the exit is hidden in the “night”. In the end, tired of escape attempts that traditionally end in failure, only humility remains; the adoption of the rules of crazy theater, where you just need to play the role, convincing yourself that it is only a role - something false, artificial, temporary; that as soon as you want - then it all ends immediately.
One word and drills his head after watching "Night" - crisis. A crisis devoid of fracture, sharpness, settled deeply - and like any crisis that has come to the personal inner field of a person, it is hardly clear how to pull it off. Heroes Antonioni run; flee from lack of feelings or lack of emotional current, still reality will overtake them.
Antonioni has two views of escape at different poles. The view of the hero Mastroianni has long lost its sharpness - the more ironic that this is the view of the writer. And when an annoying fan at a large social party asks to share this look with her, he can only lazily brush off. And his passion is just as lazy, tired, like artificial acceleration. He sees the face of his passion in hospital when the Mastroianni-Moro couple come to visit a sick friend. The face of that sick girl.
Moreau's heroine tries to run at the beginning literally. A visit to a friend has a sobering effect on her, and the bitter awareness of emptiness that has opened up throws her all over the city. Attempts to compensate for the cracks that stretch inside make you catch her gaze of every passer-by, try to penetrate someone else's moment. At some point, she wields rusty paint in her hands. And the whole escape against a background so insensitive and cold, where her figure is only an inconspicuous landscape detail. It's all in vain.
To look directly at the emptiness both have on the coming night, at the same social party. In the background - the most complex choreography of extras and shadows. The first, of course, is the most interesting. The hero of Mastroianni comes across a book whose name, apparently, should ironically highlight the whole careless crowd - "Somnambula". Or the life of the heroes before that night. He is again tied behind the young girl, she tries to escape in the pouring rain with the unknown. No one comes to anything.
In the end, to replace the urban convolutions, deserted suburbs, the darkness of the villa, both go into the natural field. At the climax, there will be insights, revelations, attempts to bring everything back. Will he come back? This outlet to the light is fraught with the same anxiety as all of Antonioni’s cinema, which requires extreme inner concentration, the ability to project itself onto his world. Especially revealing episode: a dancer in a restaurant, showing amazing plasticity, while having to hold a glass of wine on her forehead. The artist's entire cinematography - and "Night" in particular - is in this one episode.
The main theme of this masterpiece by M. Antonioni is the lack of mutual understanding between people, incommunicability of a person and atrophy of feelings. Writer, performed by Marcello Mastroianni, a representative of the bourgeois class. He writes - he gets paid for it. He has a wife (Jeanne Moreau), and will have the charm of meeting a young girl, played by Monica Vitti. That's it. The film is divided into several scenes: in the hospital with a friend, on the outskirts of the city, in a restaurant, at a party, a morning of despair. A friend dies, they visit him, a husband and wife, separated from each other. Summer. Jeanne Moreau is on the outskirts of town looking for her past, feelings that no longer exist. Stupidity of the restaurant where he and she, fenced off from each other by a wall of misunderstanding, indifference, emptiness. A party where he and she will try to get their feelings back. He is in a relationship with the heroine Monica Vitti - ' lost ' a girl who was disappointed in life. She's with a young man. But you can’t go back to the past, time has passed and they have changed. Morning is time to talk, try to set up communication. Remember. She reads him a love letter written to her years ago. He asks: 'Who wrote it?' She replies: You!' He kisses her, trying to forget and return at least the appearance of the past. End of movie. That’s just one of the themes of this beautiful film. People want to be understood, 'read'. But is it possible to understand each other when a person cannot even feel himself? What to say about others. Thus, the theme of incommunicability is associated with the theme of the disappearance of the ability to feel. Heroes try to find it again, everything they do is aimed at it. The acting jobs are great. Jeanne Moreau is natural and piercing ' thin' in the image of a woman on the verge of realizing the futility of mutual existence with a man. Moreau’s work in this film is qualitatively superior to her work in other films, even Buñuel and Truffaut. The film received the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.
9 out of 10
The hero Marcello Mastroianni is a writer named Giovanni, whom everyone only praises, admires, wants to know more. But Giovanni himself has not written anything for a long time, is in a state of creative crisis, constantly chasing ephemeral happiness and not even looking for inspiration. Most of his love affairs are connected with ordinary animal instinct, unlike his wife Lydia, who is more reasonable in this regard.
The heroine of Jeanne Moreau is a rich woman who is constantly bored, who suffers from ended love, who is constantly looking for something to seize on in her relationship with her husband, who does not even avenge treason and who accepts reality as it is, but she does not have the strength to give up everything and start again.
What do spouses have in common? After all, there should be something in a love relationship that you can grasp, something that would help you survive the period of renunciation of each other. First of all, based on Lydia's walk during the day, you can tell what they don't have. A little girl crying like a baby they don't have. A broken clock on the street is like time they've wasted on each other. The rockets that set young people on fire in the streets are like spectacles they miss in marriage. The crumbling tiles of the building as a fragile foundation of their relationship. But they have a dying friend Tomaso Garrani, whose death, the couple seemingly lost the last thing that connected them.
If we consider the plot, then it is night, which is not surprising, that the climax of the film occurs. All morning and all day, the characters accumulate a certain chain of events, which is saturated with a depressive state, the renunciation of the characters from themselves, the world, and even from each other. Heroes visit a nightclub, where they closely watch the performance of artists with a glass of wine. And it is during this erotic performance that the heroine has a “thought”, which she decides to voice only by the end of the film. After the club, out of boredom, they go to a party that they had never met before, where their feelings begin and their night begins. The heroes quickly lose each other at a party, Giovanni meets Valentina, who struggles with sadness, through a newly invented game, and it is Valentina, for a time, who becomes their new “common thing”. Lydia also finds "fascination" in the face of a young man, but still retains dignity. And all this intensity of feelings, in an almost crowded “bowl”, manages to stop the downpour, which calms the party and gives night to envelope and immerse everyone in themselves.
But "the morning of the evening is wiser", and at the end the characters are launched into a frank dialogue, which is no longer clouded by night passion. The film echoes the film “The Sweet Life” by Federico Fellini, where Marcello Mastroianni again plays Marcello Mastroianni. Jeanne Moreau reminds me of Jeanne Moreau from Louis Malle's "Elevator to the Scaffold." From the point of view of the selection of actors – nothing better and can not come up with. Operating work is also very often striking genius and correctness of geometric plans. How to understand the ending, everyone decides for himself. But this is the kind of movie where every character needs to be understood and felt. A crisis in love will backfire with a creative crisis, and a crisis in life.
9 out of 10
At night, we descended from each other’s friend with...
If the splashes of glass that once, the link, spread,
They have been reunited again, that is what is left in them now.
“Night” is a surprisingly subtle and gentle statement of the director about love that can save the modern world. And Michelangelo Antonioni looks at this world through the eyes of his heroes: the lost creative fire of the writer Giovanni, the living eyes of his wife Lydia, able to discern the true essence and exude warmth, hiding under the royal swing of eyelashes, eyes full of unspent feelings, their dying friend Tomaso, bold and mankimi – Valentina, the daughter of a rich industrialist, whose party a little later a married couple will come ... but invariably with a tenderness that “cannot be confused, and she is quiet.” Therefore, there are no expressive Italian disputes and mutual grievances. Therefore, the day sounds like a polyphony of Milan streets, admiring themselves in huge windows, where the strict beauty of architectural ensembles are reflected, suddenly replaced by a series of roughly plastered or dilapidated walls closer to the outskirts, like canvases made in grisaille technique. The boulevards and squares were not strange. See gray togas on buildings. And before running like yellow wounds, The lights were betrothed with leg bracelets. Therefore, where Lydia steps in search of answers, the city itself tells its story, mixing the past and the present, looking to the future.
So a slender series of cast-iron columns on the pedestrian sidewalk, resembling shells, suddenly changes in the perception of the howling of the ambulance siren into the sound of an air alarm - echoes of the past war and a symbol of the inevitable loss of a friend at the same time. But, seconds later, it is replaced by the noise of rockets dissecting the sky, launched by young amateurs - such an invisible touch to the dream. And when the sun hides behind the horizon, Antonioni wraps the space with a thick stirring timbre of a saxophone and a rhythmic pulsation of the double bass strings, in the mysterious atmosphere of which the true feelings of the heroes, so similar to a lotus bud, slowly begin to be revealed that they bloom after sunset for only one night. It seems that the couple cooled to each other, but several times Giovanni suddenly sees Lydia as if for the first time and the flashes of inner fire flash barely perceptibly and immediately go out, to then catch fire from the attractiveness of young Valentina. And the magnetism of Lydia, who does not come into contact with anyone at a party other than the owners of the house, will attract a charming talkative stranger. And, it would seem, it should be about treason, but the voice ... But the crystal voice seemed especially bell, When he stubbornly said the fatal “don’t” ... The queen, or perhaps only a capricious child, a tired child with a powerless torment of eyes. And here Antonioni speaks with female voices - two women as one: wise youth and young maturity - a revelation in the rustle of torrential rain.
And it immediately becomes clear that the night in the souls of the heroes came long before sunset. But this is what helps to comprehend the present and preserve as the most important value, strive to meet the silver spots and in the fleeing twilight to find anew yourself and someone whom, it turns out, never ceased to love. And while you realize this, it is difficult to breathe and painful to live, but this is the only way you can learn after the heroes of self-sufficiency and understanding the little miracle that happens between a man and a woman. Something stronger than time and habit.
The characters of the film Antonioni are an intellectual elite, experiencing times of creative crisis, in which dreams and intentions are only ghostly illusions. In the film “Night”, the director tries to convey the words of the characters through the audio-visual influence of cinema images and cinema metaphors, in an unconventional way to emphasize the inability of people to communicate, hear and understand each other, especially people of the creative profession, displaying the true reality for whom is a certain duty.
The central place in the film is occupied by the soulful throwing of the main character, Lydia, performed by Jeanne Moreau, who is able to realize the futile attempts of the spouses to cling to the preservation of marriage and a decent family life. Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) is not ready to make plans for the future, set benchmarks and be responsible to loved ones, and this is not only the fate of the Italian bohemian period of stabilized society. This problem concerns many whose spiritual emptiness is filled with false meanings. The main character cannot recognize the letter written by him, read by Jeanne Moreau at the end of the film; after which he makes meaningless promises, empty in essence utopian illusions of future family life. They are insignificant, like his life, filled with inert and impersonal forms.
Non-communicable feelings is one of the core problems of gender communication in the tetralogy of “alienation” Antonioni in general (the films “Adventure”, “Night”, “Eclipse”, “Red Desert”), and, as a result, one of the main problems of existential devastation and spiritual “poverty” of the heroes. Behind a wide screen of well-being and external respectability lies the inability to establish long-term relationships, a fruitless attempt to understand reality, a painful existence within a series of constantly changing events, the inability to realize the true purpose. These are pictures about the process of alienation from a person of social reality, as a result of which a person becomes alien to being in the ornate structure of human destinies, he cannot understand himself and others, tries to find a way out of the problems brewing at every step.
10 out of 10
Acquaintance with the peculiarities of Italian medical care in a hospital (second half of the twentieth century).
For some reason, my expectations did not disappoint me. I don't know how I didn't get there, because my friends told me. Oh, head. But not all, not all. They said the unnecessary, the empty: Antonioni is gloomy, Antonioni is dreary, Antonioni is impossible to watch, even if you can see Bela Tarra without two bottles of strong and Nicolaidis without three. Because Antonioni is decidedly despondent. No shit like that!
I don’t know whether the frame falls on my soul, or just a little prepared consciousness is waiting for the tape of the 60s, so dearly beloved dramatic setting, but not thanks to these famous Italians, but Polansky, Hitchcock and even Buñuel, yes. Of course, the Italians have something to hide. Yes, even 8 with 1/2.
Here we are climbing up (in an elevator?) inside an apparently new and noisy public health building in Milan (tell me, why is it immediately clear that Milan is the city of Milan?). I’ve only been to Italy twice a week, and in Milan, one day, in the Kremlin and somewhere in the center. And I guess I guess it was Milan! What a sight! High-rise, interchanges, streets. Noise is good. Exactly in Chelyabinsk. Cars buzz, planes howl, helicopters rustle. But the falcon flies, and the woman gives birth, and we are now in the room. Noise is going away.
The room is quiet. There's a patient, and there's his friends. There's dialogue. Everything is fine, slow, authentic. The patient's mother is coming. No, it's not the southern temperament of this woman. She's just decently restrained. But it's not secular. She's worthy and she's restrained. Hard talk, confessions, mentioned morphine supplied by doctors. Twice. You can see the pain. She's being held back. But it doesn't always work. The hand begins to squeeze the cat, the cat escapes. The hand begins to squeeze the glass. He's right. A painful farewell to the heroes is impossible for them. Out of awkwardness. Because of her, the viewer is eagerly awaiting - remove the camera from this room! Don't shoot, it's a tragedy.
And immediately after the prologue, (this is the prologue in the ward of a sick mustache, isn’t it?), the viewer plunges into the wall with his head, yes... The concrete wall. Passionate patient. Kissing, hugging, undressing, passion, sparks flying, eyes, eyes! But all of a sudden, the fuss and the slaps of the nurses. Keen's gone. At least erotic. This is '60s Italy. Then it was necessary to retire in order to indulge in carnal love, not to the Pope of spiritual love, but to a woman of flesh. Slaps. It's a violent scene.
And then it's like Kubrick. Well, naturally, it's ' Eyes Wide Shut' only 38 years before the events described in it. Europe, of course, not the United States.
Yes, not a doctor, but a writer, but a successful person is also a worker of intellectual work. Yeah, my wife doesn't smoke weed, but she acts the same way at night. Yes, we will not get with you today to a Masonic party with masks and unbridled, but the finest sex, but at a secular reception we will visit, and in the end everything will be decided in the garden, not in the store. Who will say, ' Do we need to fuck?' Nobody, it's the 60s. Here they said: 'I love you'
Kubrick, where were you looking? The subject was revealed in 1961.
Yes, there is no mystery, but there is drama and there is rain. There are swimming pools where stiff guests jump. There is even an aristocracy, isn't there, because it looks like the hero of Sidney Pollack, a merchant who persuades him to get a job. He's the same berry field. There's literature. Literature in everything. I thought it was more literature than movies. There is a young heroine who is not a prostitute, but captivates the hero with her mystery, loneliness and cynicism. There is an inexplicably rich type on a sports car taking the heroine-wife away at night. 'Net' Like a Soviet poster with a glass. Do you remember what Nicole said about the naval officer? 'Yes, and go to hell' It's the 60th in the yard. And they're just beginning, hey. The nineties will come later.
Does the living room remind you of the one where Nicole Kidman danced with her glasses off?
No, you just wouldn't imagine criticizing or blaming Kubrick on my part. A beautiful film - ' Eyes Wide Shut' and I would never have written it at all had it not been for the obvious similarity of plot, methods, characters and result. The moral is the same, isn't it?
And after all, in the center of attention we have the same married couple, not yet old, but who profited from something together. For some reason. Withering, indifference, indifference, apathy, irritation. Somewhere in the background is the death of someone who considers them their best friend. ': Why are you bored all the time?' Remember?
And a striptease performed by a black couple to a wonderful jazz. And the view of the hero Mastroiani on this case. Oh, come on, I'm gonna fall through here. It's exactly the same. Kubrick, aw... I want to ask you, what do you think?
So, back to where we started, there was no sadness, no dullness, no boredom. Triumph and delight at the end, tension and drama in every line and gesture throughout the film. Decadence, decency, hope, youth, audacity, eroticism, withering, nothingness, embarrassment, courage, idleness, wealth, passion, mannerism, indifference, love, of course, and death. Everything. Everything.
Lack of narrative? Genius? Enlightenment? Revelation? I doubt it.
Antonioni's discourse is nothing new. He appeals to two recognized masters of Italian cinema without even insisting on his own identity. In “Night” you can easily see the plot parallels with “Sweet life” Federico Fellini. This is an enlarged view of the carefree, but filled with frustrations, the life of the unexpectedly formed elite, and the personality of Marcello in the lead role, and the loneliness of the individual in a crowd of faces, and many disparate sketches that form a whole picture.
The second film with obvious intersections is Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy. Here the comparisons will be mainly stylistic. They relate to the theme of two spouses who experience a period of separation and cold, while being virtually close to each other. Faced with various external stimuli, often quite ordinary objects, the two rethink their personal relationship.
Actually, starting from two fairly well-known films by other authors, I could easily explain both the plot outline and the inner message of Antonioni’s tape. However, as a less creative figure, Antonioni does not rely on the development or adjustment of the above aspects, but on their enlargement. That is why the author will insist on the destructiveness of the spouses. It's like emphasizing the very first thing on the surface.
It must be a matter of personal choice. Everyone has the right to admire Marcello or Monica Vitti. But you can look differently, noting only the boring repetition of Mastroianni of his former images from the Fellini tapes. You can also notice the constant replays of two leading actresses, whose acting talent was very limited. It's a matter of taste and nothing more.
In general, the discussion of the film “Night” perfectly shows the whole range of misconceptions that are associated with Antonioni. Much of the discussion focuses on whether or not there is a story. Accordingly, the dispute turns to the questions of the form of the embodiment of an artistic work. Usually, this hides the question of the talent of the artist himself.
In my opinion, for all the clarity of the chosen narrative strategy, it is in this film that Antonioni confirms his superficiality. We can mention obvious borrowings, the substitution of a film about the lack of meaning by the direct lack of meaning in the film, the desire for moralization. Even a few winning miniatures (the supposedly spontaneous lighter game seemed very stylish) can not smooth out miscalculations.
Antonioni is good at something else. Thanks to him (including the film “Night”), more breakthrough and qualitatively innovative solutions from Wim Wenders and Wong Kar Vai, as well as other truly brilliant directors, were able to develop and take shape.
4 out of 10
Very strange, but at the same time very mysterious, filled with incredible magic film. The magic of the night reigns here. The magic of revelations between people in whose relationships there is so much incomprehensible and dirty garbage, in which, it would seem, you can dig for eternity.
Michelangelo Antonioni tells the story of two couples on the verge of complete family collapse. In appearance, they are the perfect couple: beautiful and sophisticated Lydia performed by French actress Jeanne Moreau and bright, expressive Giovanni, played by Italian Mastroianni. A young married couple has a real crisis of relations: they practically do not spend time together, avoid each other’s company, almost do not attend social gatherings. To the greatest crisis, the situation leads to the fact that a mutual friend of the couple Tommaso is seriously ill and is about to die. The pain of married life slowly paralyzes Lydia and Giovanni. They do not know what to do next: to confess their extinguished feelings or to try to start all over again? There is confusion between the two spouses. But here comes the night - the time of day, when any conversations or actions are filled with the most daring frankness. The night should put everything in its place. The night must draw out their true intentions. The night should expose their feelings. Frank conversations lead to a completely unexpected end: faithful and practical Lydia admits that she no longer loves the cheeky Giovanni, and the selfish husband, who cheated on Lydia with different women, in turn, tries to regain his lost family happiness. This is the paradox Antonioni comes to at the end of his film.
The main weapon of Michelangelo Antonioni in this film is silence.
The film “Night” is a whole system of intricate looks, touches, actions. Actors here almost do not say long phrases, their lines are composed to a minimum. The main thing in this film is the actions of people who were once ready to give their lives for each other.
The theme of love, passion, betrayal... The theme of separation and the upcoming choice... Where, if not in an Italian film, can you see such a range of fresh feelings?
The film, in its own way, is frank and bold, dramatic and fabulous. I recommend watching this film with a glass of good wine in a cozy home environment.
If in previous reviews I introduced the concept of “film-life”, “film-confession”, then first of all came to mind “film-soul” and “film-atmosphere”. Such associations come from the investment made by the authors. Michelangelo Antonioni gave out his inner world, full of a deep attitude.
If the film “The Scream” was born an atmosphere of super-realistic everyday life in the events of a sharp drama, then in the film “Night” Michelangelo reflected the depth of the creative person. The problems he faces. Like Fellini's 8 1/2, the protagonist is lost in himself. He rushes, he forgets. The impulses of emotions lead to ambiguous actions. The paintings are very close, but Fellini’s idea is more abstract. Michelangelo pays much less attention to the creative activity of the main character. The main focus here is on the love line. In the night shadow, the characters opened. The night took away the old and sent the heroes to the new.
Like Fellini, Antonioni did not seek crowd recognition. He expressed what was inside him and gave birth to pictures filled with soul and life. These pictures are understandable not to everyone, but to fall in love with them, it is not necessary. “Night” will want to review, finding more and more details in it. “Night” took away the friend of the main character, took away the feelings between Lydia and Giovani.
There’s nothing in my movies except how you feel. - Michelangelo Antonioni
She
She didn't know what was happening to her. It seems that everything is fine, everything is as always, the situation of the family is stable, the husband-writer is at the zenith of fame, and they are well received in the light, and she is even told how prettier she is, so often that you can begin to believe it. But for some reason the vague and trembled anxiety, which had previously rarely visited her, now not only easily comes to her, but has already firmly settled in her soul, and replaced her eyes with their own. Her husband seems to her an insensitive image, concerned only with following secular conventions, his endless fans, fans and social acquaintances - fake dolls depicting the living. The only truly alive person she ever loved, and whose maiden stupidity prevented her from marrying, died in hospital of an incurable disease, leaving her alone, forced to walk between people as if between dummies in a ready-made dress store. You can't say that these people weren't interesting, no -- she enjoyed watching them, sort of watching their private lives, sometimes so wonderful. But she was constantly gnawing at the feeling of lack of something very important and even necessary. She didn’t know what to call it, but she felt like she was choking.
Artist
The tastes of the novice director formed in an environment in which later, after the war, the neorealism of Visconti, Rossellini and de Sica was structured. But the young Antonioni looked deeper than many and immediately engaged not so much in the life of the social lower classes and naturalistic details, but in the inner world of the characters, inventing his own “inner neorealism”. It is no coincidence that he wanted to shoot his first, still amateur film in a mental asylum. However, modern society provided no less fertile material in abundance: the total disintegration of simple human ties, loneliness, which goes hand in hand with individual freedom and empowerment, callousness and deafness to the desires and sufferings of others. Interest in such things, superimposed on the attention to the immediate material context inherent in the new direction, led Antonioni to create his own original film language, most clearly manifested in the "trilogy of alienation" ("Adventure", "Night", "Eclipse") and adjacent to it "Red Desert". Deeply, figuratively and convincingly express the inner state of the characters through the surrounding material objects can not every artist. Michelangelo Antonioni could have.
He
Something in his life changed elusively, he could not figure out what it was, and no one in his circle could help him even with a hint. Everything was as always: wife and friends, books and publishers, journalists and fans. But there was something rising that separated him more and more from all that was so familiar and necessary to him. It was as if he was alone on a raft that was drifting farther and farther from the shore, and he could do nothing. He tried not to pretend that no one noticed the fear that seized him. As before, he was arrogant with fans, independent with sponsors, free-thinking with journalists. He was attracted to women, and he did not deny himself this pleasure. But he was already frightened enough not to dare to ask himself a simple question: is it true that he, as he asserted himself, had “what” to write about, but did not know “how”? Next to him was a man to whom he could believe his fears and find understanding and support. But it was her that he avoided more than others, feeling in his gut that he would have to lay everything out with her, and lying, evading, dodging - it would not work. As a good and honest man, he wanted the truth. But only one that would have come by itself, without additional effort on his part. I would have been very kind to him.
Public
The audience of the sixties is a special audience, unlike the serious and grateful viewers before, or the sybaritating popcorn noodles after the revolution of the 1960s. Cinema has ceased to be a miracle, which you watch with your mouth open, but has not yet become pure entertainment. It was in this short period that the incredible was demanded of him - the truth of life, and even such that the imagination, the mind, the feeling captured. And filmmakers tried, quite seriously considering the task of the most important of the arts to recreate life as it is. It was in the 60s that great and undeniable masterpieces were created, most frankly, convexly and at the same time fascinatingly showing the richness and poverty of the human universe. At the same time, the audience grew along with the skill of the directors: if Antonioni’s “Adventure” in Cannes was booed and called “a luxury film for five thousand snobs”, then seven years later his “Photomagnification” grabbed the golden branch and later became truly cult. "Night" was received rather restrained, but still it received its golden bear and became a long-running source of inspiration for Stanley Kubrick and other directors. Although there were some who, like Ingmar Bergman, reproached Antonioni for excessive drearyness and called his films “a devilishly boring movie.”
They
In the human universe, just as in the material universe, when you go one way, you go back to the other side. Having moved away from each other to the maximum distance, the husband and wife could not but meet. That night, a quiet warm night after a stormy party, became their meeting place and moment of truth. Seeing her again, after terribly tired empty conversations, after an unsuccessful flirtation with the owner's daughter, he suddenly realized that he loved only her. This understanding came along with the piercing pain and sudden fear of losing her, his only one, from the attachment from which he had wanted to escape for so long. He opened his mouth so that the familiar words with which he knew how to manage so deftly, could talk her away, but he felt his muteness with horror. The old verified words did not work and caused her only contemptuous bewilderment. Something more was needed, and exactly what he had feared for so long. He came close to the TRUTH, but his eyes were closed, unlike her, who was looking at something new in their relationship with increasing interest and wide-open eyes. She wasn't afraid of a breakup, she wanted certainty and was willing to pay for it. She didn't love him as much as she did before, but she didn't want to deprive him of the chance to revive their feeling. Now everything depends only on him...
Husband and wife, nice successful people. Intelligents. And they have a crisis of relations, which gradually turns into a crisis of everything that surrounds them.
Antonioni is a great master, it is not a question for him to build the right mood with a few shots. Jewelry, laconic without words and even without music! The video series is his calling card, and probably none of his contemporaries has yet reached such perfection. His class is in delicate subtlety and in a jewelry frame. The black and white camera and light make each frame flawlessly honest.
Antonioni has the answer to your questions: style. Style is a simple way of saying complex things, style is the product of ideas rather than words, and style is more important than form because it is the only proof of existence.
Every time he plunges us into his special slumber, as joyless as it is piercingly clear. Sometimes it seems that a movie invented to deceive is ideally capable of telling only the truth, and this elevates you as high as you are willing to pursue the truth. His concise film language is completely unique, and only richer, if you understand it. For example, a scene where a rocket is launched and many faces looking up into the sky. It does not impose morality, but only tells us the need for humility. Isn't that religious?
It is amazing as if you can casually and imperceptibly speak very complex words through movie characters. What is the meaning of this phrase: The future will never come! As if warning the viewer about what is actually waiting for him - a delicate finale - where without vulgar goodbyes-partitions, to which the whole plot seems to push us, the characters remain alone. If they stay in the movie, then there is no separation.
Antonioni builds his beautiful world to live freely in. When a secular party is covered with a torrential rain, it is better not to think that it is man-made, even if it is Antonian, as if the plot is gaining full force and belongs only to higher forces, one god. A millionaire or a simple writer, rain on everyone. No one can hide from the pure enlightener. Valentina said, “We have to tell each other more.” And the emphasized conclusion in a conversation with Pontano (the hero of Mastroiani) is that we cannot choose, we listen to what is given to us.
The arrogant, though not caricatured, bourgeoisie wins in every sense, but Antonioni does not hide his attitude towards them. They are always a little squat and greedy, as if by chance everything is transferred to money: “A good writer earns as much as he can – millions of dollars.” He's a real intellectual! This phrase sounds shrill today, but it is clear that we are not capable of being completely bad or completely good. Such a pitch is for a cheap movie. Antonioni's got it all in half. "Someday we'll all lose." Can you argue?
And again, wandering heroes, not the little lost, but the grown-ups all understanding - for them, disappointment is not empty words, but something fatal. How do we move on? How can you not love anyone? How do you find someone? How to overcome the indifference of habit? Is anyone else able to talk about these topics so boldly and openly?
Do you have more questions than these? If there is, it only seems so.
Everything Antonioni did was created by God. And none of the highest marks from our paltry level will denote the greatness and the highest meaning of his films.
Day. Dying Tommaso, his friend - writer Giovanni Pontano with his wife Lydia at the hospital bed. Everyone understands everything perfectly, but in a conversation they try to avoid the topic that absorbs their thoughts. Tommaso, who is not saved from pain even by morphine, braves, he is ready to discuss a pretty nurse, the convenience of modern rooms and a new book of a friend. It is only when Lydia leaves the company that he expresses his dying wishes not in the most harmonious form and confesses his feelings for his closest people for the last time. Giovanni is detached and thoughtful, he speaks with irony about his own work and with some effort forces himself to listen carefully and take the last words of a friend. And without words it is clear that much more dying connects with Lydia and her departure is a sure sign, she does not have the strength to see Tommaso in this state. But there is no escape from the formalities, proper ceremonies are observed and promises are made that will not come true.
The theme of the complexities of relationships that come with the cooling of feelings is being developed. Being together is unbearable, but there seems to be no other choice. Although the actions of the spouses are different. The husband, after the presentation of his new book, which did well without his presence, returns to the cold apartment. By inertia, not knowing what else to do. And the wife goes in search of adventure, despite the fact that she herself is not sure what exactly she needs.
Silent landscapes, gloomy houses and people seem to catch up with anguish and create a persistent atmosphere of alienation. It’s like a dream where the main character isn’t you. Someone's vision, mistakenly jumped into the wrong mind.
Perhaps among people, when you feel their closeness and feel their presence, everything will fall into place? But no, they don't seem to see you. Not them, but you in another world like ours. And these strange humanoid beings take you for a disembodied spirit.
But coming home is even worse: there is the closest person in the world, he should be, but in fact it is the same as here, among the crowd of onlookers watching the launch of missiles in the field of the suburbs of Milan.
Maybe going back to where things were different and there was life, everything will come back. And lost time, including a loving husband and the very feelings that seemed only recently. But here too lies the failure - everything has changed, seemingly remaining the same. Places so close in spirit in memories are now strangers. There is no choice but to go back. Where at least the illusion of life is preserved, where the formalities on which society rests are observed.
Evening. Boredom and longing. The choice of possible entertainment is not rich, and you can have time to try all the options, however, knowing, probably, that it will not work out. Separate flashes, hints of interest, nothing more. And meeting new people does not dilute the general mood. Boring, uninteresting and thinking only about themselves. In their worlds, you can not be your own.
Music, alcohol, cigars and conversations on different topics. Superficially - the interlocutors replace each other in some ridiculous dance. All writers have a crisis. It is not when there is nothing to write, but when you do not know how.
A billionaire's party is a depressing sight. For what? Who are all these people? Someone is looking for your society, but you have to flee from them in order not to reveal their essence to them, their interest is nonsense, unacceptable. A writer needs inspiration. Well, it can be anything. Women. They are considered to be muses. Or maybe it's just words to interest the one you like.
Night. And rain. People voluntarily get wet under cold streams of water, and those who do not jump into the pool. Doubtful entertainment, however, on the general view it seems fun, but on closer examination all the same boredom. People seem to be programmed. They do something that they find fun and interesting. But everything happens as if they are doing their job. Maybe this is the work of the rich? Pretend to live a carefree and entertaining life, so that others will envy and dream of getting into this closed club. And if they succeed, they will do the same, luring others into their own trap.
Everything flows smoothly and slowly in its turn. All opportunities to do something, to do something, in fact, are doomed to failure in advance. Nothing can change. Endless conversations without any special manifestations of emotions, almost infidelity, all this is normal. I hope this night is over, maybe in the morning everything will fall into place. Sunlight will melt the ice of human hearts. We will finally realize that we are people who can feel and live truly.
A persistent sense of unreality is emphasized by the duality of sensations. On the one hand, muted own emotions and feelings, general slowness. On the other hand, as a third-person view, there is a review and analysis of everything that happens with a detached, independent mind. He does not intervene in action, only observes, and even does not rush to draw conclusions. And all this at the same time, too strange for reality and too deep for dreaming.
Morning. The silent nightmare continues. Trying to escape is futile. The possessions of the soulless rich that night reached distant horizons. Money, power and indifference burned not only all the fields and forests, but the eyes and souls of the traps lost in the cages. I don’t know where to go and I don’t know why.
It is impossible to revive once boiling feelings against the background of general fatigue, longing and cold indifference. And Giovanni Pontano and his wife Lydia understand this. But the formalities of shells are formalities. You need to paint it, and if someone sees it.
No, loud words about the most important, spoken at the right moment have no power if they are just words. There's nothing behind it. The abyss of emptiness. At the same time frightening and leaving indifferent. Feelings do not appear by themselves, just mention them. Maybe that’s what my next book is about.
There is no life in this life, though all its attributes are in their place. No color, all in halftones with blurred edges. A fog that invisibly thickens and prevents you from realizing everything that is around. It is not night, it is not night, like death and darkness. This night is like the peace and quiet of absence.
It is not so easy to impartially evaluate a film from 50 years ago, it is difficult not to evaluate it according to the criteria of modern, more familiar films.
It’s like looking at your photo album and your grandparents’ photo albums, a huge difference, even in facial expressions, in staging, etc. And if you are not an ardent lover of retro pictures, it will be difficult to perceive long scenes without dialogue, without spectacular actions, explosions every second and so on, but you will plunge into the Night and become a silent participant in the film, watching it from the sidelines.
This is a kind of unique time machine, immersed in which you can “speek” what people were in the past, what they felt, what they said, how they expressed their feelings, emotions.
The painting “Night” is very integral, it describes, in fact, the events of one night, during which Lydia, the wife of a successful writer who is in a creative crisis, gradually realizes the aimlessness of all existence, her longing, apathy to everything that is happening. A separate bow to Jeanne Moreau, a magnificent acting, she could not even give words in the film, everything was transparently read in her eyes, all her attitude she was able to express with her eyes, face, manners, even one of her walks.
And, of course, typical of most classic films are very honest, open dialogues that are pleasant to listen to, as if you know that these words are not sucked out of your finger, but out of your soul.
In general, many would call it long, but the night always lasts a long time if you do not sleep, think.
... Somehow it turned out that the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni, although a classic of world cinema, for a long time was not part of my circle of preferences. This confirms the truth that “everything has its time.” And now I decided to watch the movie “Night”, which has long been strongly recommended by many of my friends. Among them are those who call the film the greatest in the history of cinema.
And a strange thing - meditatively - a slow plot of a black and white picture, which
Especially at first and did not fascinate, eventually led to a paradoxical result. When the credits for the end of the film came up, I suddenly realized that this movie was about me. That’s exactly what happened in my real life. With all the intricacies, doubts, unexpected situations, psychologicalism, suspicions, sympathies ...
In fact, the film is about a man and a woman. Antonioni managed to show and explore the innermost moments of their relationship, reflect the motives of unexpected actions, characteristic reactions to each other’s actions. At the same time, the viewer is given the right to specify what the director only indicated by a hint, a thin stroke of the artist’s brush.
I think the development of a male-female relationship largely depends on whether they have children or not. In the film Antonioni (among the screenwriters there is a cult T. Guerra) no children. And this is such a common situation today, which makes the plot surprisingly relevant, despite the fact that it appeared in 1961, that is, fifty years ago!
The film, again, is black and white. The action begins in the morning, smoothly passes into the night where significant events occur, and ends at dawn. The director’s amazing work with light permeates “Night” from beginning to end. "Black" and "white" has a lot of shades, overflows. Filling staff, selection of actors, dialogue – everything is mathematically accurate! And on the output we get an unusually shaky atmosphere, which sensitively reacts to the plot moves of the authors of the film. What is only one, not at all random, scene in a strip bar?
The famous Marcello Mastroiani plays the role of a popular writer amazingly subtly, justifying the opinion of himself as the best actor in the history of Italian cinema.
Usually in the reviews of “Night” it is customary to celebrate the game of Musa Antonioni – Monica Vitti as the daughter of a billionaire, a fleeting hobby of the main character.
But I was much more impressed by Jeanne Moreau’s performance as the writer’s wife. Amazing internal and external beauty, femininity. The actress managed to solve the most difficult task - to show the vulnerable and mobile psyche of a woman, and at the same time the presence of her firmness and well-defined life principles. In Antonioni’s film, it is the woman who bears the brunt of responsibility for the family. It can either easily destroy it, or preserve it no matter what.
Stunning in this regard looks like the final scene, when the wife reads a heartfelt letter to the husband-writer and he does not immediately learn that he wrote it to her once. The circle closed, the mutual understanding, which seemed to leave the characters of the film, again restored. For how long? This question remains with the audience of the film after watching it.
And there is still a belief-suspicion that without “Night”, perhaps there would not have been many subsequent masterpieces of world cinema, including a number of films by Tarkovsky and Bergman.
At least the influence of Antonioni’s intellectual creativity on these masters of cinema is obvious to me.
They did.
The greatest film in the history of cinema, one of the best films of the genius of cinema Antonioni – all these epithets I read in various publishing houses and heard from the lips of my favorite directors forced me to step out of the stream of modern cinema and look back at the masterpieces of world cinema. After watching the film, being in awe of what I saw and sensual, I wonder where such a movie is now. The film, which so subtly, accurately and most importantly comprehensively told about the feelings of a man and a woman, about their views and behavior, about the style of that time, conveyed through the screen even the smell of the spirits of the heroes.
At first it seemed too long and it seemed that you need to look more closely at the details and begin to seriously analyze the whole symbolism of the moments, more strongly to unwind the internal rhythm of the picture, but suddenly by the middle of the film, feelings simply overwhelmed both the characters and me as a viewer, all the moments that were previously misunderstood and seemed empty acquired considerable weight - the mosaic suddenly formed into a stunning deep picture with an exciting sensual plot. All the corners of the characters, all the thoughts and expectations of the heroes were opened. And all this diversity in only a subtle smile, in a casual glance, in intonation, in exact terms.
In modern cinema, it seems, very rarely, or at all, the smallest feelings of the characters are revealed with such subtlety. Now, perhaps, there is more philosophy and search for a place in the world, the world in itself, experiencing the global problems of humanity and in the cinema of the 60s, the versatility of feelings in every moment of the plot, in every second of the facial expressions of the characters, the whole story of life. I will continue to immerse myself in the classics of cinema - fascinating and insanely beautiful.
Now for me, the painting by Theo Angelopoulos “The Interrupted Step of the Stork” has received an even greater plot and mental coloration. And by the way, the text of the letter, which reads the heroine of Jeanne Moreau, will again be uttered by her in the short film Theo Angelopoulos “Three Minutes”, only there this text will be sent on behalf of Jeanne Moreau to Marcello Mastroiani.
It's embarrassing to admit, I didn't quite understand and understand this film. Apparently, one view is not enough for this. But one thing I can say is that this is a very strange and fascinating retro. Where black and white does not hide, but on the contrary - emphasizes beauty.
The story I’m used to seeing is missing. There are scraps, and a hint of a bound line, but it's all ghostly and plays the last role. The narrative is based on the inner experiences of the main characters and their surroundings. Antonioni understands people much deeper than it seems at first glance, and much better than his colleagues in the workshop. Without using the help of dialogues and pathetic monologues, he reveals the image of each character through the play of actors. An ambitious writer who has a “creative crisis”, who is tired of everything and tries to find pleasure in this world and every time is disappointed, interrupted by fleeting flashes of passion. His wife, a strong and beautiful woman who is sick with feelings, she is in dire need of love and simple human happiness, receiving in return only the callousness and cold of her once romantic husband.
The operator can safely put a monument. Such skill in modern films will not meet, and if you see it, in the author's film somewhere at the festivals of European cinema. Just to choose such angles without love for your work is unrealistic. Simple things like home furnishings and a broken clock on the ground, launching homemade rockets into the air and a street fight look like real masterpieces. And the scene when it rained during a social party is probably one of the most insane and beautiful scenes in the world of cinema.
The creators walk on the sharp edge of censorship, as if inadvertently, demonstrating the charms of women. By the way, the female beauty of the picture is perfectly emphasized, sometimes only one silhouette is enough to fall in love without memory. Or just find in the impenetrable darkness, under the streams of rain, what has long been lost.
The depressive mood of the picture sets up a kind of apathy to the surrounding world, to melancholy, to the desire to create something beautiful and sad. It’s like you’re the most miserable person on earth, a person who has forgotten how to feel. I forgot how to love. So, if someone wanted retrospectives, wine and candles with the girl of his dreams, then the Night will disappoint you a little and destroy the atmosphere, this is a single-player movie. So that no one sits next to him and sings under his ear.
Impressions after the film were ambiguous, on the one hand, to fully feel its atmosphere, I need to see other films by Antonioni, on the other, I was involved in a rampant depression, in which I wanted a little peace and space for thoughts that swarmed invisible bees, were in my head. I love, or I do not love, or maybe it is all empty and base, maybe everything that once became sublime, turned to dust and erased from memory ... the answer is somewhere on the surface.
For those who love good old movies, for those who love cinema as an art form, and just for passionate melancholics who love to think. One day I will once again plunge into this world, but it takes time, but in the meantime, thank you for your attention!
9 out of 10
The saying that no man is an island is a lie. People are those islands, and there is a bottomless void between them. The shaky bridges that they throw over each other quickly decrepit and wear out, and, in the end, loneliness remains. Single people in single families live on their own and die alone. And you can sin as much as you like for the era of incommunicability, which - paradoxically! - is aggravated by the emergence of new ways and means of communication, but the matter is different. Love becomes a habit, and happiness from the fact that your loved one is next to you sooner or later turns into a desire to be alone.
Giovanni and Lydia have been married for a long time, their life is fine, everything is calm, usually. Just like everyone else. It was once called love. It's just marriage now. A serious illness of their friend suddenly turns out to be the very first domino knuckle, which, having fallen, is able to bring down the entire structure. And if Giovanni in the emptiness surrounding him could not hear for whom the bell tolls, then Lydia, perhaps not yet realizing that everything has changed, already quite certainly felt it. She tries to escape, to close herself, to understand. She returns to where she was once happy with Giovanni, but despite the fact that everything in that place remains the same, she herself has become different. Lydia does not want to stay in the apartment alone with her husband, and goes with him to a party, hoping that there she will be able to forget. But inexorably comes the morning, and with it the realization that the irreparable has already happened, and nothing can be changed.
Movies about how the dream ship unravels its belly on the reefs of reality, there are many. But no one has made this catastrophe so commonplace and yet devastating as Antonioni. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau do without tantrums and explosions of emotions, “Night” is very smooth, measured, as if emphasizing the extinction of the feelings of the heroes. And when the dawn finally comes, everything becomes clear. Gone is the time when scandal and beating dishes, like an electric shock, it was possible to reanimate what was still alive. Now it makes no sense, just as it makes no sense to look for the right and the guilty and try to catch up with desperate kisses. This is the end.
Michelangelo Antonioni builds walls of incomprehension between the characters, and each dialogue rests on these walls, and slides on them into the void. Giovanni tries to fill this void with social parties and casual mistresses, and this creates the illusion of moving forward. In fact, he has long been in stagnation, a deep creative and personal crisis. Lydia absorbs this emptiness into herself, merges with her until she realizes that she has nothing else left. The director is ruthless to his characters: he devastates them, forcing them to look back at the past in the last minutes to even more fully reflect the hopelessness of the present.
What happened, where did they miss the moment when something finally broke? It's actually simple. Something that always happens happened. Life. It's a very universal story. And if someone looks back at their marriage and realizes that something is wrong, then Antonioni is right again, and one can only hope that it is not too late to change everything.
He and she. Husband and wife.
He is an elderly writer, experiencing a crisis, can not find himself and seeks new meaning in things, in new people, while forgetting about his wife as a person and pushing her to the background. He is completely immersed in himself until he meets Valentina (Monica Vitti), the 22-year-old daughter of a billionaire who doesn’t really know what she wants because her feelings are inexplicably mixed. She falls in love with Him for one night.
She is a beautiful woman, burdened with responsibility and devotion to her husband. She wants to die so as not to experience anything. Love is gone, there's no need to live. It's heavy inside. He's bored with her. And it is difficult for her to have relationships with other men because of the same dried rubber that connects her with her husband.
The acting is impeccable: so deep and so simple. The film is beautiful and interesting: an evening, champagne, people in the pool in the rain, the figure of Monica Vitti at the window ... and everyone is happy.
