Day 96: L’avventura (1960)
“L’avventura,” directed by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, is a tale about choices, both the ones we decide to make and the ones we decide to ignore. With its lush settings and beautiful stars, a film like this could be mistaken for simple melodrama at the beginning, but quickly it careens off the beaten path, taking us to a place where the events that occur have us crying out for answers the film has no plans to answer.
In “L’avventura,” Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti) are two best friends who meet up with Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna’s lover, for a yacht trip to “Lisca Bianca,” a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily. While the trip seems to be going well, Anna soon grows bored of Sandro and, after Claudia and Sandro fall asleep sunbathing, she disappears all together. Though at first the two are simply annoyed with Anna’s actions, as time goes on, they grow worried and, eventually, call Anna’s diplomat father to come to the island with a search party.
Arriving with a police ship and helicopter, Anna’s father begins conducting a search and rescue operation but, no matter how long they look, no trace of Anna can be found. Fearing her dead, Claudia and Sandro return to their lives, holding out hope that one day Anna will return, but, as the days turn into weeks, the two find themselves holding a certain new attraction towards one another, forcing each to decide if their feelings can outweight the guilt of Anna’s disappearance.
Upon it’s release at Cannes, “L’avventura” was cat called and booed by its audience in such a harsh manner that director Antonioni and Monica Vitti fled the theater. Though the film would later become a classic with both critics and viewers upon its actual release, the question remains why the film could bring out so much unbridled anger in that first viewing audience. The best guess seems to stem from a certain part of the film’s ending, which can be given away without truly harming the watching experience. By the end, Anna has not only never been found, but the entire film shifts its focus away from the mystery and transforms itself into Claudia and Sandro’s love story.
With this abrupt change in the story, many consider the actions of the characters to feel disjointed or untrue to what would actually occur. To explain this, Antonioni said, in his reaction to the Cannes incident, “The tragedy in “L’avventura” stems directly from an erotic impulse of this type: unhappy, miserable, futile. To be critically aware of the vulgarity and the futility of such an overwhelming erotic impulse, as is the case with the protagonist in “L’avventura”, is not enough or serves no purpose. And here we witness the crumbling of a myth, which proclaims it is enough for us to know, to be critically conscious of ourselves, to analyze ourselves, in all our complexities and in every facet of our personality. The fact that matters is that such an examination is not enough. It is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure.”
By using the true and honest impulsive nature of humans and not simply following normal story protocol, Antonioni’s “L’avventura” is a one of a kind example of how patterns form in the ways we take in film and, when that pattern is broken we lash out against it. It is because of its willingness to break the mold that makes it still as fresh a film as when it was unceremoniously booed those many years ago.
To learn more about “L’avventura,” check out Criterion’s page here.
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