If you want to really appreciate a more serious movie, you must first get used to the characteristics of this movie. Like Antonioni’s previous works, the rhythm of "Night" is slow, the atmosphere is calm, and the plot is calm. Audiences who are not familiar with him may find it a little boring. However, don't watch this work just because Antonioni is a recognized master. It’s nothing to be a pity. If a movie can’t inspire you to think, cannot resonate with you, or even bring you the most basic satisfaction, then no matter how famous the movie is, it won’t matter to you. meaningful.
When I was watching "Night", from what perspective did I think? I'm not trying to spoil my overall feelings about the film, but in order to make this clear, I have to clarify it.
Human alienation, individual loneliness
The alienation of people is the eternal theme of Antonioni's movies, and this theme is even more vividly expressed in "Night". The two female characters in the movie feel insecure for everyone around them. The first is Lydia, the wife of the protagonist Pontano. The film begins when the two go to the hospital to visit an old friend who has been seriously ill for a long time and whose life is precarious. Lydia could not hide her sorrow and left early. Just as Pontano was also preparing to leave, a beautiful, but obviously mentally problematic woman rushed out of the ward next door and began to tease Pontano sexually. After getting away, Pontano and Lydia converge. In the car, Pontano tried to confess what had just happened to Lydia, because in his opinion, it might be regarded as a small infidelity, but Lydia didn't care. In fact, her husband is the first person Lydia began to alienate. Their seemingly divine marriage has long been stripped of the love element, like a weak flame about to lose fuel supply. Pontano is a new best-selling author, but Lydia hates his husband's life. She doesn't want to stay at her husband's new bookmark sale for a second, because there are people there.
She went out and wandered blankly in the street. Following Lydia’s perspective, the film begins to render an atmosphere of individual loneliness: pedestrians on the street are like clockwork, performing their set tasks coldly, stiff and lifeless; aircraft engines and sirens are harsh. The roar almost pierces the eardrums, but what this image really represents is the pollution of people's spiritual world by the disorderly expansion of the commercial society. Lydia is a curious bystander, but it is difficult to tell if she is out of sheer boredom or genuine interest. She is not a completely neutral observer. When she sees a group of children fighting, she will bravely come forward to persuade the fight, but when the other party tries to communicate with her, she runs away-she doesn't want to have too much with anyone Intersection.
In the high-class banquet she attended with her husband, Lydia hardly interacted with anyone. She was just doing irregular Brownian exercises between the various venues, until she saw her husband kissing the beautiful Valentina at the banquet. As a wife, even though she has been estranged from her husband for a long time, she is still a little shocked. Out of a temporary temperament, she promised to dance with a strange man and entered his car together. However, Lydia reined in front of the cliff before things reached the final step. "sorry, I can not". How can she? Even for her husband who has slept with her for more than ten years, Lydia can only achieve the voluntary closeness of her partner. How can she accept the touch of a strange man overnight?
Valentina, the second main female character in the film, has a more ambiguous understanding of the relationship between people. On the one hand, she longed to be close to people. When Pontano first met Valentina, she was playing an unknown game alone. When Pontano offered to play together, she did not refuse. At the end of the game, the small game that originally belonged to the two of them attracted a large crowd of onlookers, and Valentina did not feel uncomfortable either.
On the other hand, Valentina does not believe that intimate relationships with others are meaningful. Faced with Pontano, who fell in love at first sight and the other party was also interested, she had the idea of longing for love for the first time. But when Valentina learned that Pontano was a married man, she "was awake". Even though she could see at a glance that there was no love between Pontano and Lydia, she chose to escape. She clearly knew that the distance between her and others was too far, even Pontano could not go beyond the uninhabited wilderness and rescue her from the emptiness.
Perhaps as Sartre said: "Others are hell."
The middle class's confusion about inner happiness, desperate boredom
When the sky suddenly rained heavily, the first reaction of the men and women at the banquet was not to panic looking for shelter from the rain, but to embrace and jump into the swimming pool to play in ecstasy. This is the most absurd part of the film, and it can best be reflected in the retaliatory pursuit of happiness by the middle class in the context of the re-accumulation of wealth after World War II.
There is a detail in this scene: when it rains, a lady is ecstatic as mad, and after the rain stops, she cries madly. Through the farce in the rain, the director almost made it clear that people have not become happier because of the increasingly abundant material life. They are only satisfied with superficial sensual pleasures. Sensory pleasure is extremely short-lived. When the dopamine tide recedes in the brain, it is an abyss of boredom, emptiness and loneliness. People are like small fish on the beach after low tide, suffocating, accepting the sun's exposure, and gradually dying in their hearts.
At the end of the film, Pontano and Lydia had a long-lost communication. Lydia read to Pontano the love letter he wrote to her when he was young. Pontano didn't even react for a while. This was his own brushwork. When he realized this, he fell into a deep sense of self-blame and guilt. How can he forget such precious emotions? He kissed Lydia frantically, either in vain to make up for it, or a belated show of loyalty. However, Lydia knew her heart very well: "No, I don't love you anymore."
Maybe Lydia should have realized this from the beginning. Putting momentary passion and unfulfilled promises into the concept of so-called "love" is like creating an unreliable subprime loan. When the cruel time and impetuous reality wear off the freshness, everything begins to collapse .
Director Antonioni believes that life is meaningless if a person lives a lifetime only to pursue vanity and to satisfy the inferior biological nature of mating and reproduction. In his love trilogy, the male protagonist is often fragile in heart and is extremely vulnerable to these temptations. The male protagonists clearly realized the contradiction between their own vulnerability and individual existence, and their inner activities were tangled and complicated, but the director used extremely tense lens language and expressive techniques to show this complexity. Sexually displayed to the audience, such as Sandro's regretful tears at the end of "Adventure", and Pontano's compensatory kiss to his wife at the end of the film. This is one of the most powerful aspects of director Antonioni.
I want to talk about the style of Antonioni's movies. He is a maverick director in his era. He doesn't think that film is an artistic tool to entertain the public. On the contrary, he hopes that film can bring people thinking and give people a good medicine for their empty spiritual life. Therefore, he almost hates the use of mature Hollywood methods to add dramatic plot content to his movies. This created the hollow and calm texture of his movie, which made me not want to have any thought process in my mind when watching the first half of the movie. Of course, the first half of the movie does not require thinking. "Don't try to understand it, feel it". I isolate myself in the room, just like the character in the film. While watching the second half of the film, I walked out and communicated with my friends from time to time, in order to actually feel the "nothingness" between people-because I really realized what the film wanted to convey That kind of theme. It can be said that the inspiration for my thinking about the movie "Night" was discovered after I jumped out of the film.
In Antonioni's love trilogy, each has lines that I like to memorize. What "Night" brings me is the love letter from the film Pontano to Lydia. Audiences who have truly loved someone and fell asleep with him can find that the love letter is sincere. I read the sentences of this love letter word by word, constantly superimposing images in my mind, as if following the most accurate mapping software, I found the gentlest emotion in my heart. Here, you might as well excerpt this love letter:
When I woke up this morning and you were still asleep, I listened to your gentle breathing and looked at your closed eyes under your randomly scattered hair. I was deeply moved. I wanted to shout out and wake you up. , But you sleep so soundly, in the gleam of the morning, your skin shines with the radiance of life, so warm and so sweet, I want to kiss you, but I am afraid to wake you up, I am afraid that you will wake up again in my arms . And I want something, something that no one else can take away, that is completely mine, that is your eternal appearance. Behind your face, I saw a pure and beautiful scene that showed us In my life, the days to come, and even the days that have passed away, for the first time I feel that you have always belonged to me. What a miracle! Tonight will be eternal, with your warmth, your thoughts, your wishes. At this moment, I realized how much I love you, Lydia! My heart is surging and I can’t help crying. This will never end. We will be like this throughout our lives. Not only intimacy, but we will belong to each other. No one, nothing can destroy except the only threat-feelings. Demise. Then you woke up, surrounded me with a smile and kissed me, making me feel fearless. We will always be like this. The passage of time and the death of feelings cannot destroy our bond.
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