This ground-breaking film won a Special Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and established its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, as a major international talent. The plot concerns a yachting trip by a small group of jaded socialites, including Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), an aging architect who sold out for easy money long ago, his mistress Anna (Lea Massari), and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), who doesn't fit in with the wealthy jet-setters' dissolute ethics. When Anna disappears during a tour of a volcanic island, Claudia initially blames Sandro's emotionally barren behavior toward her. As they search the island, however, Claudia and Sandro grow closer and -- when it is apparent that Anna is gone forever -- become lovers. Unfortunately, Sandro cannot find anything decent inside himself and betrays Claudia with a local prostitute. Caught in the act, Sandro has a heartrending breakdown on a desolate beach, but Claudia silently forgives him. L'avventura caught many audiences who were expecting a mystery by surprise; as in La notte (1961), The Eclipse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), Antonioni is interested less in developing a logical story than in exploring states of feeling and breakdowns in human connection. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Review
Catcalls greeted its Cannes Film Festival premiere, but filmmakers and critics recognized the artistic importance of Michelangelo Antonioni's experiments with psychologizing film narrative, and L'avventura (1960) was awarded a special Jury Prize. Abandoning the kind of cause-and-effect plot line that might be expected in a film about the search for a missing woman, Antonioni instead sought to examine the barren inner lives of the postwar rich; the "adventure" is in the encounters between characters as they attempt and fail to make emotional connections. Limiting the audience's knowledge of Anna's disappearance to what Sandro and Claudia learn, and depicting screen actions in real time, Antonioni turns viewing the film into a direct experience of the initial excitement over the search and the waning of involvement as the effort becomes fruitless. Antonioni's carefully controlled deep focus widescreen compositions further communicate the characters' existential ennui and psychic disconnection from each other in evocatively barren environments. Bolstered by the Cannes experience, L'avventura became Antonioni's first worldwide success; released within a year of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959), L'avventura helped announce a vital new era in international art cinema. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
L'avventura (The Adventure) is a 1960Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and developed from his initial story. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti star. It is noted for its careful pacing which puts a focus on visual composition and character development, along with its unusual narrative structure which, taken altogether, "systematically subverted the filmic codes, practices and structures in currency at its time."[1]
The film was produced in 1959 on location in Italy, under difficult financial and physical conditions, and made Monica Vitti an international star.[2] It is the first of a "trilogy" by Antonioni, followed by La notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962).
L'avventura has a narrative structure in which an apparently important central mystery is gradually forgotten and left unsolved.
The story begins as two young women, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), meet up for a yacht trip. After picking up Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), the three join two wealthy couples from Rome on the boat and wind up visiting Lisca Bianca, an almost unpopulated volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, where Anna shows her boredom and unhappiness with the sometimes childish Sandro. After napping on the rocks, they awaken to find that Anna has gone without a trace. Annoyed at first, then worried, they search for her, helped by Anna's diplomat father, who soon comes to the island with a police ship and helicopter.
However, within a few days they all drift back into their own lives as the story shifts to a new and somewhat stormy relationship between Sandro and Claudia, who is at once happy and wracked with guilt over her missing best friend. On the rooftop of a cathedral, Sandro asks Claudia to marry him, but she is mostly too startled by this to answer in a meaningful way. The two then check into a swank resort hotel near Messina where Sandro's business partner is staying. While Claudia goes to bed, Sandro stays up and wanders among the partying guests. Claudia spends a more or less sleepless night waiting for him to come back to their room, and as dawn breaks frantically searches for Sandro throughout the now deserted public spaces of the hotel, only to find him on a couch with a costly call girl. Claudia flees them both and breaks down into tears on a vista overlooking the sea. Sandro, seemingly disgusted with himself, catches up to her.
The last scene, which has no dialogue, starkly shows Sandro's almost hopeless weakness and emptiness as he sits in tears before a blank, scarred wall while Claudia stands steadfastly beside him, Mount Etna brooding behind her as if ready to erupt.[3][4]
Responses
Released in 1960, the film was booed by members of the audience during its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (Antonioni and Vitti fled the theater); but after a second screening it won the Jury Prize[5] and went on to both international box office success and what has since been described as "hysteria."[1][2][6]
L'Avventura influenced the visual language of cinema, changing how subsequent movies looked, and has been named by some critics as one of the best ever made. However, it has been criticized by others for its seemingly uneventful plot and slow pacing along with the existentialist themes.[1][2][3][4]
Meaning
Much has been made of Anna's unsolved disappearance, which Roger Ebert has described as being linked to the film's mostly wealthy, bored, and spoiled characters, none of whom have fulfilling relationships: They are all, wrote Ebert, "on the brink of disappearance."[6] Along with much of Antonioni's other work, L'avventura is often cited as an early feminist film with strong and richly characterized female protagonists.[2]
