Why do we watch films? There are many answers to this question, but I would imagine the most common response is because they are therapeutic:  Tragedies allow us to release emotion; comedies distract us from the harsher aspects of life. Cinema also transports, in the sense that it carries us to a different place. This is a quality that makes watching movies in dreary Ithaca (now approaching its wintry dreariest) a particularly admirable pursuit. 

So, what do we make of a film that conveys neither of these qualities? This is precisely how one could describe famed Italian director Michael Antonioni’s 1961 film La Notte, which chronicles a day in the life of an unhappily married couple in Milan. The story follows Giovanni and Lidia, a successful, stylish couple living in the heart of the city. The two begin their day in a hospital, visiting a sick friend, and end it at a fancy financier’s party, arguing over their mutually ailing relationship. 

The movie is usually seen as the second in a trilogy of films beginning with L’Avventura and ending with L’Eclisse. These three movies deal with similar themes, and feature a few of the same actors — most notably Monica Vitti. Vitti, Antonioni’s muse and a favorite icon of mine, delivers a remarkable performance here as the one girl who manages to, if only momentarily, break through to Giovanni and Lidia.

It may seem bizarre to critique a film set in 1960s Milan as non-transporting (surely, 1960s Milan is foreign and exotic enough for even the most jaded film writer?). However, apart from its foreign setting, and some small visual thrills (thoroughly cool clothes, cars, and careening shots of Milan streets) the movie does not carry us anywhere.

Antonioni’s film is essentially about alienation, loneliness, and purposelessness. The great irony, though, is that his characters experience all of these feelings against the backdrop of a bustling city, bursting at the seams with constant activity. The characters look loneliest when others surround them. 

The desolation of the characters is mirrored by the spaces they occupy. Everything is flat. Giovanni and Lidia appear as cardboard cutouts against two-dimensional backgrounds. As famed film critic Pauline Kael said, “the spatial becomes glacial.”

Incidentally, Kael panned the movie. 

For her, the minimalism of the plot, and the fact that no true reason is given for the marriage’s failing made La Notte nothing more than a simplistic exercise in “fashionable despair.” 

“In La Notte we see people for whom life has lost all meaning, but we’re given no insight into why […] their alienation is meaningless — an empty pose,” she wrote. 

But I think Kael was wrong to reduce La Notte to this. To try and give depth or explanation to the character’s ennui and dissatisfaction would be to miss the point fundamentally. It doesn’t really matter why they’re unhappy. In fact, we get the sense that there is no real reason for their misery, save falling out of love. 

And according to Kael, the end of love is a sad but rather ordinary event — unworthy of the importance Antonioni attaches to it. “Isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity?” she asked. 

But even if one believes Giovanni and Lidia’s suffering to be adolescent and indulgent (and I personally do not), does that make La Notte worthless?

Emphatically not. In fact, what this movie shows is that whether one is an adult or child, rich or poor, we all feel entitled to our own misery. There may even be something deeply absurd, childish or irrational in our feelings, but we cling to them nonetheless. 

So maybe we never totally understand Lidia or Giovanni’s unhappiness. So what? We don’t need to get it; it’s their unhappiness, not ours. And moreover, would having the so-called facts of their unhappiness help us grasp the nuances of their feelings?

Maybe I was wrong earlier to say that La Notte does not take us anywhere, for it undoubtedly takes us further into ourselves. And therein lies its value. La Notte is not hopeful and it is certainly not uplifting. But it is a poignant and, to a certain extent, realistic representation of human feeling. This movie asserts our right to feel and express these feelings in our own way, even if we come across as confused and fragmented as our broken hearts.