La notte takes place over one night in Milan. While visiting a dying friend, a novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) realize that there is little left between them. The rest of the night is spent in escape and disillusionment, played out against Antonioni’s rigorous sense of place and architecture. Vitti appears as Valentina, the daughter of a millionaire industrialist; a budding writer herself, alluring and aloof, she observes and intersects with the couple at a party at her father’s villa. Embodied as perhaps only Vitti could, Valentina is playful, prematurely jaded, and a moral touchstone in a quagmire of compromise.