L’Avventura (1960)

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Starring Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti.

In a Nutshell: A woman becomes involved with the lover of her missing friend.

If it is hard to measure the impact L’Avventura had on cinema upon its release, perhaps it is because so little of it feels dated today. The first of Antonioni’s Incommunicability Trilogy, and the one where Antonioni found his voice in the privileged desolation of his characters. Translated, the title is “The Adventure,” a wry comment on the stunted emotions of the wealthy Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti). Sandro had been the lover of Claudia’s friend Anna (Lea Massari), stuck in a relationship that grew more estranged by the day. After a visit to a deserted island, Anna disappears. Not just from the scenery; once Claudia and Sandro begin their love affair, it is as though Anna had never existed. There is a Hitchcock element to this first act, but Antonioni does not seem to care about Anna anymore than Claudia and Sandro do. And there is something very wrong with that.

The island of Anna’s disappearance is an abyss of edged, sloping rocks, with hardly any plants and no animals. On land, the extravagance of Sicily has never looked so barren or its people so drab and clammy. The opening scene watches a vast patch of lush earth being excavated. Such images (courtesy of Aldo Scavarda) reflect despair on the amorality of its people. No crescendo of love is ever reached; Claudia and Sandro pass through their affair like lost spirits. When Sandro shatters the white noise, it is as though Claudia regains an entire consciousness, remembering what it is to feel again.

Perhaps that is a harsh characterization. Vitti (Antonioni’s muse in three subsequent films) delicately navigates Claudia’s plight: to batter against one’s own hollowness, grasping for happiness. She does not judge Claudia, and neither does Antonioni. Instead he offers the experience (the “adventure”) as its own commentary. Pure mood, L’Avventura is liberated from structure or a tangible purpose to its events. This made it a breakthrough in storytelling. And it is that story, of empty impulses and insulated angst that has earned L’Avventura’s legacy into our modern day. Draw your own conclusions about the sad, sterile lives of Claudia, Sandro and the rest. For their adventures will continue to reinvent themselves as our lifestyles continually leave the moral landscape in disarray.