A new year! It’s now almost nine years since the first “Italian Film Night” back on Friday 21 January in 2005. We presented Satyricon back then, and have since moved from the first century AD to the twentieth. Our last screening, in August, was L’Avventura. A member of our mailing list has told me that she was just about to attend for the first time until my précis of that film persuaded her that the experience would be unendurable. That was certainly not the impression I’d intended to convey. I bring this up because we’re beginning 2014 with La Notte, the second installment of Antonioni’s “Quartet of Alienation,” which I have taken the precaution of pre-screening, and I’m here to tell the mailing list that I like it at least as much as L'Avventura, which I liked very well indeed. Passive, craggily handsome novelist Marcello Mastroianni is here married to conflicted, oddly puffy Jeanne Moreau. The couple move through the streets of 1960 Milan, with old and new architecture starkly counterposed beginning with the brief, magnificent first shot. There’s not much of a story here (some critics have suggested that the architecture is properly the subject and the human figures the incidental backdrop—I mention this conclusion without endorsing it), but as always, Antonioni’s eye delivers the goods: how many directors today possess anything like his infallible instinct? Not many, I suspect, and the exact figure is likely closer to that roundest of numbers than we’d prefer. This was a man who could have adapted the Poughkeepsie phone directory to the screen and made it visually memorable. Incidentally, the first scene takes place in a hospital, and if the level of medical attention depicted therein is typical of Italian healthcare circa 1960, then we need to bend our national energies toward the goal of matching those indices, boy-howdy! The next time I’m perishing of a wasting disease, that’s the kind of hospital TLC I want.
We’ll screen the thing on Saturday, 25 January, opening the doors at 6:00 as usual. As the regulars know, we present a groaning board of “small plates,” including vegetarian options, that constitute in aggregate a full meal. Timely RSVPs are always appreciated.
Above: Typical Milanese hospital room (for one) of half a century ago. Note champagne, crystal goblets, photogenic nurse. No styrofoam in evidence.
