La Notte Reviews

As entertaining as the ‘hot sins’ are, sometimes it’s good cinema to follow the book fool, mostly free of these popular sins, but just living a quietly unenlightened life. Society and the other book fools look up to him, but he hasn’t found the way to happiness. 

Incidentally I’ve also seen L’Avventura by the same director, although I’m not sure if I have a preference between the two. They’re both solid films…. This isn’t better or worse than a Greta Gerwig film; it’s kinda the 1961 version of “Nights and Weekends”…. Although obviously I understand what they’re saying because it’s subtitled—like Shakespeare, I could understand Greek if only it were subtitled—I have to say that it’s a nice touch that the movie isn’t solely driven along by dialogue. It’s a movie with physical intelligence, you know. 

…. It certainly has a quiet charm. It’s definitely not a plot movie, it’s rather character-driven or perhaps thematic, in a sorta roundabout kind of way; you can’t really say, easily, the theme is X, but they have interesting conversations, teachable moments…. It’s not about sweeping away pleasure or getting swept up into pleasure, but it is rather pleasant. In a dependable way. 

…. I guess you could say it’s closer to the stereotype of “European”—lazy afternoons in old cities eventually bleeding into evening parties—than the stereotype of “Italian”, you know—passion. 

…. Oh, I hate technology sometimes; but I am devoted. Again: 

This relates more to my division of things on LT than here, and I understand that you could disagree with this, but I have to say that, unlike ballet & opera, art films like this are more part of popular media than scholariness/humanities studies (and you know that there are three cultures and not two, since you can’t study Marvel movies in your Shakespeare class), you know. It’s just that art films are the popular mind being “good”, you know. Obviously there are many different sorts of things that are popular, or were popular, or are written in one or another sort of popular style, some of them more classically good than others, although I do draw the dividing line somewhere, you know.… 

Anyway, being classically good is one of the things that you can be, although here we are clearly dealing with “goodness” mixed with a dash of cinn—of cynicism, you know. I actually got the two lead actresses confused—ha ha ha, I am your brave leader!—but I did kinda get that it’s a sad movie, in a rather quiet way, you know. 

Edit: And, incidentally, it’s an art film (I term I refuse to define and do not use precisely) because it’s by Mr Subtle Director, not because it’s not made in English in California. I don’t know how many blockbusters are made in Italian—probably none—but obviously it’s possible for a popular/non-intellectual film to come from outside the USA…. I’m not saying that the public has no bad habits: never watch movies in other languages; excessive loyalty to franchises; watch movies to gain valuable factoids about car brands and/or fictional science; and just plain ole, killing time. But this is still a movie, and not “a book”, right, and so I think it is popular in a way that even a middlebrow literary novel (say, an unknown girl trying to get compared to a Dead Russian), is not. (Incidentally, it’s easier for girls to be More intellectual or whatever, so long as it doesn’t involve, well, conducting people from one scene to the next.) Though obviously anything can be intellectualized. People watch baseball to brush up on their statistical analysis and fictional calculus, am I right? Actually science is a great example of that, intellectualizing the simple: you can write the most scientific things about the simplest organisms (or, if this is better, the simplest processes), since that’s all we pretend to be able to understand, right. And, of course, intellectualizing is also what I do, in my own eminently charmable way. 

To be honest, it has been ages since I saw this movie and I should definitely re-watch at some point. I have to admit that except for ‘Blowup, I didn’t care so much for the movies I have seen directed by Michelangelo Antonioni but there is no denying that, in the 60's, he was a major movie director and this movie was one of the many masterpieces he made back in those days. Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni were both really strong here as they delivered some great perfomances. Above all, I thought it was a very deep movie which didn't deal with some chases, shootings, explosions and special effects but with relationships and the human mind in general. Eventually, I really loved the damned thing and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like genre.