Tuesday, October 1, 2013

La Notte

La Notte, the middle film in Michelangelo Antonioni's unnoffically titled Malaise trilogy, follows a discontented writer (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) as they make preparations to attend a party. Like L'Avventura which preceded it and L'eclisse which followed, La Notte follows vacuous, upper class sorts to indeterminable destinations but unlike those films it fails to enthrall and tedium quickly takes over. Despite a memorable concluding sequence, La Notte is a mostly dreadful bore and the kind of picture that gives art house films a bad name.