LA NOTTE Michelangelo Antonioni, director/Eureka Blu-Ray  Fairly early in La Notte, Marcello Mastroianni makes a rather weak attempt to resist a voracious, mentally disturbed girl in a hospital who gives every indication of nymphomania as pulls him (she is naked) towards her bed. It was a scene that gave the censors trouble in its day, and it is only now in the 21st century that viewers are able to see (courtesy of a splendid Eureka Blu-ray restoration) the things that would clearly have totally destroyed our moral compass had we been permitted to view them on the film’s release. The work that established Antonioni’s pre-eminence in Italian cinema really began with the trilogy of L’Avventura (1960), The Night (La Notte, 1961) and The Eclipse (L’Eclisse, 1962) and would be consolidated by his colour masterpiece Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964). The international celebrity that began with the English-language films Blow Up (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1969) remains a controversial period (not least because of The Passenger (Professione Reporter, 1965) with Jack Nicholson). The director’s La Notte/The Night took the strategies of its predecessor even further forward in its examination of the unfulfilled lives of its protagonists. Myriad examples of Antonioni’s artistry abound here, along with some of the coolest and most uninflected acting in Italian cinema, with a cast that included Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti. Having appeared for the most operatic of Italian directors in La Dolce Vita, Mastroianni was now cast in a film for the cool, analytical Antonioni. La Notte (1961) enshrines one of the actor’s finest performances, very different from his Marcello in La Dolce Vita but equally buffeted by life’s circumstances. L’Avventura, of course, had been the signature film for Antonioni and Vitti, a masterpiece that established the duo in a similar fashion to the teaming of Mastroianni and Fellini in La Dolce Vita. The film was shot in Sicily and the Ligurian islands, and Vitti’s performance (eschewing all the dramatic tics that had been the standard both in Hollywood and at Cinecittà) represented a new kind of film acting. It is the cool, underplayed aspects of many of her roles for Antonioni – such as that in La Notte — that looks as modern as ever today, with the refusal to rely on any kind of artificial dramatic semaphore. The actress’s interior life seems quite as rich and convincing as anything played by graduates of the Stella Adler/Lee Strasbourg schools. Her performance in La Notte was striking, though the role was a small one: the film belonged to Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as the estranged couple attempting to find some meaning in their lives.