La Notte (1961) Running Time 120: 00 min
Some people are born to be. Like Ellen DeGenres was never meant to give anyone or anything a bona, Charlie Tuna was born to tell you, you suck and still not make you feel bad, and Helen Zille was born to win Mr. Transvestite Cape Town 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and we’re holding thumbs for 2010 Dawg!
Michelangelo Antonioni falls into this category, but his can be understood as Bad Muthafucka!
La Notte is tragic, yet gleefully poetic, La Notte just oozes the pain and starchedsuitedness of a marriage of convenience between the mind and the body.
From its outset we realise something is a wry in the province of Milan –wait, Milan’s not a state- a dying Bernhard Wicki introduces us to the Potano domestic war, exploded across a marriage held together by the greys and thin papers of pride, lies and infidelity. The Monochromatic tragedy enacted by Giovanni and Lidia is something you would only wish on your worst enemies step-sister.
Giovanni the serial Freak, tries to stick his dick in everything that walks in this Golden Bear Winner, but the real tragedy of it all is his missus Lidia who encourages and almost inspires such activity, stating the unpleasant, lies not In the action but rather not committing the act.
It’s a flurry of poignant silences which constructs the inner-conflicts the 20th Century ornamental intellectual suffers faced with the precarious nature of his role which is steeped In the emotions of others who celebrate the idea of him more than his ideas. Giovanni played by the uber-masculine and badass Marcello Mastroianni realises the two-piece Black Tuxedo suit which Giorgio Armani would cement in the minds of 21st Century Post-Modernist Consumer Whores twenty years later. Never has one seen something so well put together appear so tatty and vulnerable, never possessed by desire or direction, Giovanni plays the cigar-toting intellectual sprouting fortune cookie wisdom, like Roger Federer sprouts the elixir of life from his nipples. But the tragedy of it all is his puppet automated status, his perfectly fitted suit, his bat-shit crazy wife and the screeching existential crisis he finds himself in but unwilling to engage with.
Its cold, like Siberian hookers after Jack the Rippers been in town, Antonioni’s a bad man, a real bad man and in this flick he displays his craft through his idiosyncratic style through the use of excessive long-takes, screaming muted silences, Fantastical mis-en-scene and an almost drunken cinema-verite panning style which awakens at just the right moments to awaken the audience member and force it to acknowledge the tragedy of the Modern Existential Condition.
They don’t make them like they used to, Bras that it is –mine’s chaffing- and this is a classic example of this.
WATCH IT, WEAR IT, STEAL IT, DO SOMETHING, BUT DON’T MISS OUT ON ONE OF THE GREATEST LA NOTTE OF YOUR LIVES.
IN LOVE AND SPINACH.
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