La Nuit

I apologize for those words, but I haven't seen a movie about sh*t like "Night" in a long time. I don't like the characters portrayed here, I don't like their lifestyle, and I don't like what the film is actually about because it's about nothing. I am starting to like this era of Italian and French cinema less and less. (07/04/2015)

A very impressively constructed emotional melodrama with a simple message, a beautiful directorial touch and a cinematography pulsing with life. More than a story, the script resembles a sequence of symbolic scenes that expresses both the spiritual emptiness that prevails between the central couple and the general absurdity of the existential motives of the social elite, their utter indifference and superficiality. Nothing much happens, but it's beautiful to watch and I can never get tired of actors like Moreau and Mastroianni. But I have two major issues. Firstly, these premises, in the way they are written and executed, feel like a mere intellectual pseudo-artistic bastion of imagery, not to mention how often they were dissected by the Italian artists of the time. And secondly, the film should have ended with the couple's departure from Valentina's room, everything that is said afterwards is nothing but a tediously set-up mush and a self-centred attempt to reach the finale with the deepest and most moving turn of phrase. And I really wanted to give it 4*. (29/11/2015)

Antonioni's famous tetralogy of emotions with Monica Vitti is one big inflated bubble about wandering from nothing to nothing. It is about staging situations that are seemingly universal and yet banal. Here, for example, we have Milan and the story of a few hours in which we meet a married couple defined perhaps only by their penchant for better clothes and, especially for Jeanne Moreau, the need to dress up whenever the mood changes. If this is enough to make you happy, then go for it. Marcello, more than ever, is just a sort of silhouette of a man in a tuxedo, while Bernhard Wicki has too little room to achieve anything deeper. And Monica? She is only there to approve the fact that the couple actually dismantled her in one night. Aestheticized to the point of pretentious boredom elevated to art. (15/06/2017)