This is pretty much the film I wanted LA DOLCE VITA (1960) to be, as well as JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965), 8½ (1963), and hell, pretty much every film Fellini ever made. You see, Fellini never found a way to effectively oscillate between narrative and abstraction. He was so high on poetry and oddity that he never could structure his festival visions without wildly flying off the rails to indulge in every whim, wit and grotesquerie known to man. Antonioni, on the other hand, has a similar poetic depth and visual enchantment, but unlike Fellini the meaning of his abstract images are always tied to brooding narrative surfaces, with characters who ache, rot, and despair over situations you actually feel intensely in your bones. Personal feelings, as opposed to shimmering spectacles, are the substance of Antonioni's work. 

LA NOTTE examines an emotionally cold marriage through psychologically glistening imagery. The film opens with the upper-crust couple visiting a cancer-dying friend in the hospital, and from this decaying preface we're prepared for all the marital deterioration to come.

Giovanni, the bookish intellectual played by the forever aloof Marcello Mastroianni, is the kind of character Fellini endlessly cribbed but never could humanize (with one strong exception). Here Mastroianni‘s a celebrated artist, opposite Fellini's struggling filmmaker, who drags his frustrated wife, Lidia, through academic hell, similar to how Giorgio pulled his unwilling wife through psycho-sexual, male-driven fantasies. Her life has become nothing more than a hapless shadow of her husband's glory. And the worst part? He no longer loves her, and she no longer loves him, but they feign all the wedded rituals that couples do to keep it together. 

One stunning set-piece finds the couple at a nightclub as they impassively watch a scantily clad woman contort her body into shapes aided by her leading male partner. The erotic dance portends everything we've seen so far and everything to come, like a crooked metaphor for how depressed and de-sexualized their marriage has become. As the night goes on, Giovanni and Lidia fall deeper and deeper into dislocated spaces, fumbling with other people at a wild book-signing party that only alienates them further. Seduction and sexual betrayal test the bonds of their matrimony through EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) descent, each suspended by boredom in a way that makes them unable to grasp the prisons of their own making. If you listen closely you can cut through all that party noise and hear the silent thrum of how destructive suppression can be. 

LA DOLCE VITA wanted to capture this spiritual drift that led postwar Italians to lead empty, insulated, decadent lives, but it never localized that conflict as specifically as LA NOTTE does by portraying a marriage in shambles. The same intellectual climate that permeated Fellini's vision is also here, only intensely humanized through a grounded relationship that keeps the drama alive. Antonioni's look at the artistic life and its spiritual toll on human relationships is also much better realized than 8½ ever pulled off, because again, he keeps his dazzling abstractions centered within a narrative framework that pulls. JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, which shares similar marital threads to LA NOTTE, goes completely gonzo with its many bells and whistles, whereas Antonioni uses non sequiturs as a way to examine the pain and isolation of his characters, but never to their complete reckless dismissal. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Antonioni made in one film what Fellini tried over his entire career, and I'm just sorta in awe by how effective and moving the result is. He's the filmmaker I always wanted Fellini to be.

Antonioni Ranked