L'AVVENTURA (1960)

A.K.A.: The Adventure

Country: Italy

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Cast: Monica Vitti / Gabriele Ferzetti / Lea Massari

Plot

When a young woman goes missing during a yachting trip with her wealthy friends, her fiancé and best friend begin a search to find out what became of her.  However, the pair quickly become distracted by their attraction to one another and the search becomes less important to them than their affair.

Thoughts

Director Michelangelo Antonioni clearly knew he had something special in lead actress Monica Vitti.  Of course, he cast her in the lead, but he also spent plenty of his movie on close ups of her face - as emotive as it is easy on the eyes - and he went on to use her in multiple subsequent films.  She is indeed something special, and does a terrific job portraying Claudia, a young woman conflicted by her growing romantic relationship with the fiancé of her missing best friend Anna.  Lea Massari, who plays Anna, a more mysterious character even before she disappears, steals the initial scenes from Vitti.  However, once Anna is gone, Claudia’s character is allowed to develop into the film’s most interesting facet overall.  Most of that development plays out over Vitti’s face and body, rather than through dialogue.  Claudia is the only central character who is not wealthy and perhaps because of that she allows herself to feel guilt and devotion on a deeper level than the rest of her circle, making her the perfect character on whom to center a movie such as this.  As the film’s conflict is primarily inner turmoil within Claudia, Vitti had to not only embody the character of Claudia, she had to embody the story of “L’Avventura” as well, and she did so impressively.

Outside of the performances (most of which convincingly capture the jaded self-obsession of the well-to-do, which is the crux of the emotional turmoil between Claudia and Sandro), the setting, and cinematography, all of which are a pleasure to witness, there is no real reason to watch “L’Avventura” from an entertainment perspective.  The plot narrative plot is overly simple.  In terms of story, the description I gave above is literally everything that actually happens in the movie.  The rest of the film’s story is all internal within the characters.  It’s impressive to watch masters (actors, director, photographers) excelling at their craft, but the traditional thrills and catharsis one might associate with the cinema experience are mostly if not completely absent here.  In the beginning, one gets the sense that we might be entering into a mystery film, what with the search for the inexplicably disappeared Anna; however, the film quickly moves away from traditional mystery elements in favor of more philosophical and social themes.  If you’re looking for escapist cinema, with the exception of the beautiful people and settings, you won’t find much of it in “L’Avventura.”

Most Memorable Scene

As stated in the prior paragraph, following Anna’s disappearance, Antonioni does dabble a bit in elements of traditional mystery thriller films, and he does so effectively enough to make the viewer feel as though they are present in the scene.  As the central characters search a craggy volcanic island in the ocean for their missing friend, the viewer’s eyes can’t help but desperately prowl the surf, the cliffs, and the hills for any sign of Anna as though we were one of her friends.  Camera work works fluidly with the nature of the location and the event to create a real sense of urgency and drama, even on multiple viewings.  Also as stated before, the filmmakers intentionally move away from this approach as the movie progresses, but these scenes resonate in the memory as terrific examples of just how effective of a mainstream director Antonioni could have been, had he any interest in mainstream success.


My Rating: 3.5 out of 5