I did a thing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCyZyA9YlU

How do I put this delicately? La Notte is simply the finest film I have ever seen. I have reached this point after much careful consideration. The mastery of the film is inescapable and the conclusion I have come to feels inevitable. La Notte is a perfect example of the cinema's ultimate grammar. It's the best film in the whole world.

La Notte is a film of reflections, of internalized deterioration made visibly external through false extensions of our composite social selves. Giovanni's novels are imprecise reflections of his intellectualism. His wife, Lidia, is an untrue, forced reflection of his masculine and social worth. The role of architecture in La Notte serves as the mirror…

I'm really getting to like the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, having loved this, L'Avventura and Blow-Up.

Whilst the first film of his alienation trilogy had an otherworldly, slow, fevered atmosphere some describe as boredom, it was in much of La Notte that I found something akin to boredom or neutrality or even a very mild depression: a feeling of what standard days are like in the spaces between things: the way that much of life is spent waiting for things to get better, to change, to happen. This doesn't make it sound like an exciting watch, but then if that matters you'd probably be better off with a Bruce Willis movie.

La Notte is a very grown-up film about a…

→ Part of my Italian Summer Challenge

Whereas Antonioni’s L’Avventura was centered on a secondary plot and its dispassionate participants, La Notte focuses on a broken marriage whose spouses are incredibly captivating people. Giovanni (a transparent Marcello Mastroianni) is an eminent writer who no longer recognizes himself and doesn’t live so much as remembers his years. His wife Lidia (a magnificent Jeanne Moreau) is a sensitive and worldly woman who is emptied out by her subordination to Giovanni’s existence; her own intellectual life has become merely a reflection of his.

The identity crises that afflict these characters are thoroughly studied in this feature, and make us reflect on human connections and their duration, intensity, desires and predicaments. During the titular…

Shifting from the freeform open space of the sea and the bustling interiors of parties into the claustrophobic and oppressive nestled alleyways of the bustling city, Antonioni moves from dreamlike soundscapes to the off-kilter unsettling affect of the diegetic noise of cars and footsteps and birdsong and life as it crumbles around these characters, these people. Everything is automated in the world of La Notte, a sign of a world removed from itself. I may well be executed for saying this, but La Notte is Bergman without the hostile demeanor of the cinematography, it's Bergman with a more loving touch, Bergman with a caress - and it's wholly its own.

I have discovered recently what exactly the thematic strand is…

« When I awoke this morning, you were still asleep. As I awoke, I heard your gentle breathing, I saw your closed eyes, beneath wisps of stray hair, and I was deeply moved. I wanted to cry out, to wake you up, but you slept so deeply and soundly. In the half light, your skin glowed with life, so warm and sweet I wanted to kiss it but I was afraid of waking you up, I was afraid of you being awake in my arms again. Instead, I wanted 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…