Few thoughts on Antonioni’s La Notte.

Wonderful film. Visually stunning. Loved the “Felliniesque” and “Fitzgeraldesque” themes and
aesthetical approach towards those themes. However, I’d like to point out that I don’t necessarily
see the ending as pessimistic. I believe it is purposefully left open for interpretation.

On the one hand, we can see the ending in a negative tone. Their marriage is dead. They’ve
suspected this for long, but have been directly confronted by it only tonight, all throughout the
party. But instead of actually going through the discomfort of putting their marriage to rest, of
actually burying it, they prefer to continue living the lie. What does their embrace, the only sexual
interaction between the main characters that occurs on-screen, mean in this case? Does Giovanni
embrace Lydia as a means of compensating her for, or perhaps distracting her from, the fact that
he’s forgotten that it was he who wrote the love letter she reads out loud? Why does she read it in
the first place? Is it as a form of epitaph for their dead marriage? Or perhaps it is done with scorn,
so as to show Giovanni what they once had and is now lost, what he once felt for her and doesn’t
any longer?

But on the other hand, couldn’t it all be interpreted under a different light? Couldn’t it be that the
crisis they go through at the party, again an embodiment of something they’ve been suspecting for
long, had a sort of cathartic effect? Couldn’t it be that they’ve found again what they once had and
lost? I believe it is purposefully left unanswered. Whatever the meaning actually is, whether an
entire defeat in the face of the absolute vacuousness and ennui of haute-bourgeoisie and
philistine-like life, or a triumph over it, it is left to the viewer to decide.

Few more thoughts.

It is interesting how much of a point it is made in making Valentina an Lydia looking like each
other. In fact they are a stand-in for each other. Giovanni attempts to move from Lydia to
Valentina, but the truth is that he’s not moving at all. His displacement occurs within a very
narrow space: he likes a certain type. He feels attracted to Valentina simply because she has all his
wife has, plus that which he feels she’s lost, and he’s counting on the elements he believes Lydia
once possessed but doesn’t anymore to make the connection he cannot make with his wife,
mainly, but really with nobody anymore. But the connection is not made here either, because it is
him who’s lacking, him who’s really lost something irretrievable.

I like the way the story refers to itself constantly. The dancer juggling with a full glass of wine
represents the flimsiness of the emotional circumstances of the main characters in the film, and of
anyone moving in a circle where ennui and disinterest are rampant. The story Rozy tells Giovanni
about a man living with a woman he doesn’t love but who loves him and sacrifices for the sake of
another woman’s happiness is of course an outline of part of the plot. The story about the hermit
who used to drink dew and now is an alcoholic is about Giovanni himself, once pure, enthusiastic,
now too far into the other side and not really caring that much.
Again, how much have Lydia and Giovanni learned about each other and themselves by the end of
the night? And how does this affect their relantionship and their lives? Do they decide to just go
on with the lie, or will they really make an attempt at starting all over?