by Allan Fish
(Italy 1960 145m) DVD1/2
Poor things abandoned by the sea
p Amato Pennasilico d Michelangelo Antonioni w Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Tonino Guerra story Michelangelo Antonioni ph Aldo Scavarda ed Eraldo da Roma m Giovanni Fusco art Piero Poletto
Monica Vitti (Claudia), Gabriele Ferzetti (Sandro), Léa Massari (Anna), Dominique Blanchar (Giulia), James Addams (Corrado), Renzo Ricci, Esmerelda Ruspoli, Lello Luttazzi, Dorothy de Poliolo, Giovanni Petrucci,
It is thus that a group of islands are described by one of the rich party who go there on an excursion. These are no ordinary islands; silent, mysterious, desolate, volcanic, forbidding, marking time like the Old Man of Hoy. On their ragged rocks men have walked for millennia. Ruins are said to exist thereon. Ancient vases are found and casually destroyed. For this party of rich care not what they do or what gets damaged. They have too much money to care and emotions can go hang themselves.
The film begins rather slowly, dreamily one might say. A young woman, Anna, advises her father that she is off on a jaunt for a few days with friends. She goes to meet her lover and, one assumes, they make love. They are soon seen on the boat to the island and there one begins to see into these characters. Anna is vain, capricious, impulsive, spoilt and, like many such rich people, frightfully bored of her friends, her lover and her life in general. She jumps overboard for something to do, causing the whole party to stop the boat, then pretends a shark is in the waters just for a joke and to call attention to herself (though we have actually seen that there is a shark around). By this point, one is becoming as bored with her as she is with everything. Then, just as one begins to fear the worst, she’s gone; disappeared without trace. At first the party search casually, believing it to be only a matter of time before she’s discovered. After all, how many places can a girl hide on such a rock? Eventually they realise the seriousness and alert the authorities. Divers and helicopters are brought in without success. Her friend stays behind to look for her until all the islands are fully combed, but to no avail. She’s gone and, like the best mysteries, they never find her.
Anna disappears after just twenty minutes or so but her spirit haunts the movie long after, in much the same way as the coincidentally similar Psycho is haunted by Janet Leigh, though here we don’t know the outcome before the search begins. Has she ended it all, finally bored not only of her life but her own boredom? Has one of the party killed her for an unexplained reason? Was there a significance in that small outboard motor boat that rows past the island in exactly the next shot after we last see Anna on the rocks? Or are there more mysterious forces at work here? (Like the later Picnic at Hanging Rock, also based upon a disappearance among mythical rocks.)
If so, it’s not really the point, for the film is not really about Anna. It’s about her friend and boyfriend staying loyal to a memory, but of a woman who scarcely deserved such devotion after death. The adventure here is not to the islands, but rather into the human soul. Here guilt rules, so that we know Sandro and Claudia’s love is doomed, even perhaps a touch unreal. After a mysterious death or suicide acquaintances always ask themselves if there is something they could have done, a futile but understandable process of elimination. None of the people on the island were responsible, or so we assume. It’s a question of picking up the pieces and carrying on as best they can.
Antonioni’s films are not quite so well regarded as once they were and certainly his later La Notte and Il Desserto Rosso don’t have the power they may once have had. Maybe the novelty has worn off. What marks L’Avventura out is that we can all relate to the emotions on screen and he is well served by his muse Monica Vitti, who is superb as the agonising Claudia. Antonioni’s film may not be an adventure in the strictest sense, but adventures are a way of enriching one’s life experience and, I assure you, you will feel that your existence is the better for seeing what is arguably Antonioni’s greatest film.
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Allan, for me there is no question that this is Antonioni’s masterpiece. I’m impressed that you were able to describe so much about a movie that I would find virtually impossible to describe. Antonioni’s movies tend to be opaque, but this is surely the most opaque of them all. I think of him as one of the most visual of all film directors (maybe the most visual), and that is what I remember most strongly about his movies, the images that linger long after the movie has ended. This one has some of the most haunting of his images, just the simplest elements–the vast, liquid, sun-drenched, timeless sea and sky, the solidity and texture of those looming rocks and islands, the tiny boats, the isolated people, all in glorious minimalist tones of black and white. Today huge, expensive productions are referred to as “movie experiences,” but for me “L’Avventura” is the movie experience par excellence. And it really needs to be seen (the first time at least) on the big screen where you can lose yourself in it. Everything about the movie is amorphous, except for those fabulous images.
you’re this high up in the cinematic firmament, Finchy, it’s all a matter of favouritism, rather than pure excellence. I can’t argue with anyone naming L’Avventura his best film.
L’Avventura was one of the first European films that I saw in my college film class, so it has special significance to me. Although I wrote a paper on it, my understanding of the film was pretty academic at the time. Subsequent viewings — despite Antonioni’s relative “fall from grace,” leave me feeling that this is truly a masterpiece of cinema that challenges one to check preconceptions and expectations at the door.
The more I see it the richer in meaning it becomes. (Antoninoi’s “Il Grido” has the same effect on me.)
One shot in this film particularly stays in my mind: After the woman’s disappearance, Monica Vitti looks down between the rocks to the rumbling water below, the effect being that we are looking into her turbulent soul.
Rarely before and rarely since have cinematic images suggested so much.
Pierre: That is quite a superlative intro to L’AVENTURA’s entrance into your life, and how it has held you in its grasp. That Monica Vitti/between the rocks sequence is quite the excellent insight. I’m actually going to look at that (sequence) again later today, as you have me most interested. And your final sentence there pretty much says it all about Antonioni.
I would hope that there’s been a bit of a resurgance in critical interest and appraisal since Antonioni’s much-noticed demise, but perhaps that’s wishful thinking. (I’m still grappling with the cosmic significance of him dying on the same day as Bergman…that was really quite a seminal time in this decade, wasn’t it? It also marked my first forays into the blogosphere, if I’m not mistaken.)
One interesting note: Lea Massari seems so different here, her scowling countenance generally overshadowed by Vitti’s beatific glow, than in Murmur of the Heart, where her seductive smiles denote the warm earth mother (oddly enough, she seems younger in that film than the one made over a decade earlier).