Character Analysis In Antonioni's La Notte Moreau

In Antonioni’s La Notte Moreau uses this mastery, which previously brought a new love life, to end a dying one. The film’s final sequence again finds Moreau, this time as Lidia, walking away from a love interest— Giovanni. Like Jeanne, Lidia refuses to look back at the man that trails behind her, but Lidia’s gaze is level, and focused on what’s ahead. She turns only momentarily to respond to Giovanni, matter-of-factly, and as she walks off screen she seems content to leave Giovanni behind. When the two stop, Lydia turns, hesitates, and somewhat reluctantly tells him about Tommaso’s death. She cock’s her head gently at his response, doubting his concern, and then begins to reminisce about Tomasso.

Moreau takes a very similar moment—woman walking away from love interest, and only reluctantly engaging with him—and is able to make it vastly different. Moreau has asserted that thought can go on beforehand, and in each case thought surely has, directing her attitude toward each man, however these attitudes become manifest, in each case, through the same class of

At the moment of contact—specifically handholding— Moreau engages, has a moment of realization, resists, and then—to some degree, acquiesces. However the scenes, while both so vividly physical, are radically different in tone and narrative significance. This difference is initiated by the decisions Moreau makes prior to the scene —the germinal “thought (that) go(es) on beforehand”—and is carried out by actions enabled by commitment to functioning in the present moment, the moment of performance. The emotions expressed by here intense physical presence, are delivered subtly, but in such consistent abundance, that her acting appears profoundly fluid. It is perhaps for this reason, in part, that Moreau’s portrayals of feminine love are so consistently associated, in these films and others, with floods, fluids, at fluidity