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Films of inertia, exhaustion and alienation - Antonioni has perfected this style. The critics and film lovers got lost in endless debates about Antonioni's art (don't we all miss it: intellectuals blowing endless amounts of smoke into the air, dressed in black and having an espresso about Antonioni's bulky art?). La Notte, but his second famous film also met with rejection, even hatred: Pauline Kael wrote in 1961 what new insights this film would bring us about failed communication, where the characters on the screen would give nothing of themselves? So we don't learn anything about their inner life, whether they have anything to say at all - whether they could talk at all? Antonioni does not tell conventional stories. He uses apparent coincidences, secondary reasons, to show developments. Does he simply follow his characters in their contradictions and carelessness? Antonioni himself stated in an interview in 1969 that he often did not know the meaning even during a shoot and that he was not necessarily in the picture afterwards. Under certain circumstances, a film is simply a whim or depicts a certain lifestyle (?) Antonioni often gets his ideas on location during the shooting and instinctively improvises. Without thinking too much about it, Antonioni says, he only decides what to do with the material during editing. Even after more than 40 years, La Notte still seems bold and modern when cool architecture and strangely absent people meet. People and their surroundings are mirrored time and again - and the result is almost something like a world of ghosts. Lidia and Giovanni Pontano (Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni) are stuck in traffic jams on their way to a reception for his latest book. Later, Lidia will set out alone on an exploratory tour towards the outskirts of the city. We see the couple in their apartment, at a nightclub and finally at a party. Both perceive the events differently, maybe they don't love each other anymore? We can interpret gestures and glances as signs of disappointment. Encounters with other people suggest a downward spiral. Not only the couple is strangers to each other, but also the area in which they once lived has lost its face. In Antonioni's film there is neither an inner nor an outer movement. The first sequence determines everything. The characters never move, an emotional outburst would be unthinkable. Nothing really can occupy Lidia, that is the plot of La Notte.