La Notte

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 drama, the romantic conflicts of an intellectual couple in bourgeois Milan come to life in a visually dazzling yet psychologically dislocating pageant of clashing architectural styles. The Pontanos—Giovanni (Marcello Matroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)—are in trouble from the start. He’s an esteemed writer, she’s an educated and frustrated housewife, and a hospital visit to their terminally ill friend Tommaso (Bernhard Wicki) lays bare the couple’s fault lines. When Lidia, fleeing Giovanni, wanders through various neighborhoods, Antonioni submerges her in exotically inventive angles that transform the city into impenetrably alluring abstractions. The erotic roundelay that follows, at a wild party thrown by a philosophically inclined industrialist (Vincenzo Corbella), plays out as if following the blueprints of his villa’s layout and the scheme of its décor. Antonioni captures vast currents of shifting power—whether sexual or cultural—in chilling and resonant details. The Pontanos’ climactic confrontation on a golf course turns that wry setting into a primeval forest of their conflicting desires. In Italian. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; May 20)