“When I awake this morning, you were still asleep. As I awoke I heard you gentle breathing. I saw you closed eyes beneath wisps of stray hair and I was deeply moved. I wanted to cry out, to wake you, but you slept so deeply, so soundly. In the half-light you skin gloved with life so warm and sweet. I wanted to kiss it, but I was afraid to wake you. I was afraid of you awake in my arms again. Instead, I wanted to something no one could take from me, mine alone…this eternal image of you. Beyond your face I saw a pure, beautiful vision showing us in the perspective of my whole life…all the year to come, even all the years past.”

‘La Notte’, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1961, is an Italian drama following a day in the life of a couple in Milan. Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni play Lidia and Giovanni. Giovanni is a writer about to publish a new book, and, throughout the film, we are witness to his infidelities and to his wife’s resigned apathy. Through the day they visit a dying friend in hospital where Giovanni has a liaison with a disturbed female patient in the neighbouring room, then, after Giovanni relays this story, Lidia spends time walking the streets. Finally, for a last substantial portion of the film, the couple go to a party where they spend the night playing games and avoiding one another. It’s a stark, bleak movie that strips back the dialogue and look to focus on the reactions of the characters. For all this, there is a clear modernist feeling from the framing, lighting and sets, the design is almost brutalist, and there is something jarring but absorbing in setting what would usually be a romantic plot (the fracturing and possible reconciliation of a couple) against the background of this dry and clinical cinematography. In many ways it’s an anti-romance – the relationships between the characters are fractured and flawed in a way that is reminiscent of the French New Wave, particularly movies such as ‘Last Year at Marienbad‘. It doesn’t have the character or enigmatic mystery of Antonioni’s later film ‘Blow-up’, but is it compelling and mesmerizingly cool.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s snappy and unsentimental and, like Fellini, gives an insight into the contradictions and hypocrisies of upper middle class Italian society. Watch in a double bill with ‘Last Year at Marienbad’.