L'AVVENTURA (1960)

Friends Anna and Claudia are about to embark on a yacht trip off the Sicilian coast with Sandro, Anna's boyfriend who has just returned from a long business trip, and two other couples. When Anna and Claudia stop by Sandro's place to pick him up, Anna and Sandro, who both seem a bit disgruntled with their relationship, engage in somewhat desultory sex, leaving Claudia pacing in the street outside. On the yacht, relations among all the couples seem a bit unsettled, with the single Claudia observing the tensions around her. At one point, Anna jumps impulsively into the water and claims to see a shark, but this seems to be just an attention-getting move. The yacht stops at a small rocky island where the passengers get out to explore, but when they regroup, Anna is missing. They search for a time, and eventually they call in police from a nearby town, and when nothing comes of the search, Sandro and Claudia, the two closest to Anna, decide to search towns on the mainland where she has supposedly been sighted while the other friends continue on their trip. In one town, they observe a would-be celebrity named Gloria Perkins trying to attract press attention, surrounded by men and proclaiming that she is a writer who feels "in touch with" Tolstoy and Shakespeare. A pharmacist who claims that Anna was in his store sends Claudia and Sandro to the town of Noto, filled with stark blocky architecture and mostly empty of people, except when Sandro leaves Claudia alone in the streets for a moment when dozens of men congregate menacingly around her. Soon Claudia and Sandro begin an affair, and the search for Anna fades into the background. The two catch up with some of the other passengers who are holding a huge party at a fancy hotel. While Claudia decides to skip most of the festivities, Sandro attends and winds up at dawn groping Gloria Perkins on a couch in the lobby. Claudia finds them, Sandro is appropriately chastened, and he ends up in tears on a bench on the hotel roof as Claudia tentatively consoles him.

This film from Michelangelo Antonioni jump-started the European art film craze of the 1960s, along with Godard's BREATHLESS and Resnais's HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. It's often referred to as a movie in which nothing happens, though as one can tell from the summary above, things do happen, but they largely seem to be incidental things, apparently unrelated to what we assume will be the plot's engine, the search for the missing Anna. This became the first in a series of three Antonioni movies unofficially referred as an alienation trilogy, as the theme of all the films relates to the alienation we feel from our fellow humans and from our surroundings—though frankly, most of Antonioni’s films after the trilogy mine the same material. The first time I watched the movie, many years ago, it felt long and slow and, indeed, like nothing much was happening (with the narrative or the characters) because I kept waiting for the mystery of the missing Anna to be solved. This time, after knowing the outcome and having seen the other trilogy films (LA NOTTE and L’ECLISSE), I paid more attention to the visuals and the acting. Physical space, landscapes and architecture are important here, often symbolic of emotions and mental states. The scenes in Noto are the most impressive, highlighting buildings which were designed during the fascist reign of Mussolini, as opposed to the older, more classic designs we see elsewhere. The director has said that the movie is a critique of modern morality, or lack of it, though ironically the film was attacked on grounds of being immoral (adultery galore). There is no explicit sex here, though a long outdoor scene of Sandro and Claudia kissing passionately is quite sexy, and climaxed by a shot of a train barreling along beside the couple, which I took to be a satirical comment on the traditional "train through a tunnel" sex imagery. 

The two central actors couldn't be better. Monica Vitti (Claudia) is stunning looking and sensual, and her face conveys subtle shifts in her emotional states, coldly observant in the beginning, confused by her feelings for Sandro later, and finally in the end ambiguous in her moral outlook. At times, the mature looking Gabriele Ferzetti (Sandro) seems like a father figure to both Anna and Claudia, though Ferzetti was only six years older than Vitti, but he is convincingly attractive and seems a solid, settled presence to the younger women. Lea Massari (Anna) is only in the first half-hour but she haunts the rest of the film, until you realize that she no longer does. Critics often say that the dialogue here is unimportant, which isn't really true—it's more that the visuals (both backgrounds and actors' faces) carry as much of the narrative as the dialogue. But there are indeed not many memorable lines. I only noted one line in my notes: "Islands, I don't get them," says one of the passengers on the yacht. While I appreciated this movie much more the second time through, it still felt a bit long with individual scenes which could stand some trimming. But in many ways, this is a feast for the eyes and the mind, and even people who don't take to art films might get something out of this, even if it's just to say that they watched a movie where nothing happens. The title is Italian for "adventure" but is also a slang term for a fling. [DVD]