La notte

Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a couple re-examining their emotional bonds.

Two of the giants of film-acting come together as a married couple living in crisis: Marcello Mastroianni (La dolce vita, 8-1/2) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim,). He is a renowned author and “public intellectual”; she is “the wife”. Over the course of one day and the night into which it inevitably bleeds, the pair will come to re-examine their emotional bonds, and grapple with the question of whether love and communication are even possible in a world built out of profligate idylls and sexual hysteria

Photographed in rapturous black-and-white by the great Gianni di Venanzo, La Notte is one of the masterworks of 1960s cinema; a sprawling study of Italy’s upper middle-class and an x-ray of modern man’s psychic desolation.