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Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Written by Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Tonino Guerra
Starring Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari
Italy, 1960
Not Rated (for mature audiences)
REACTIONS
The films that honestly move you- that crawl and linger under your skin and seem to have an inexhaustible ability to move you again and again as you remember them over the weeks, months, and years- cannot be explained with any human language. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "There are five or six films in cinematic history one would like to review with these words alone: ‘This is the most beautiful of films!’" and this is how I feel about L’Avventura. Those words state simply what is too complicated to completely tell. The Michelangelo Antonioni film, my first, is not entertainment, and it confounds and makes one restless, but my love for it is different than my love for other films, more entertaining films. It’s a weird, confusing passion; it’s as if L’Avventura created a new void in me, and then filled it.
The beauty of L’Avventura feels immediately authentic and organic, but it is also deceptive. Do not trust the title, which translates into The Adventure. The movie’s more like a prelude to a burial. This pseudo-mystery involves the idle rich of Italy (you get the feeling the film could only have been made in Italian: the English language is too widely used and French is too romantic), specifically Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), a wealthy architect; Anna (Lea Massari), Sandro’s discontented sweetheart; and Claudia (Monica Vitti), Anna’s best friend. The three go on a yachting trip with some other high society people, and we become aware of Anna’s obsession with testing her estranged lover, using tricks like yelling "Shark!" while they’re swimming to force him into demonstrating his chivalry. She soon gets lost on a small desert island, and we never see her again. Is she playing tricks on Sandro? Has he hidden her some place, or killed her? There are some tantalizing scenes in which we hear boats passing and wonder if she left on one, but it’s even in question whether they are real or just figments. Anna’s vanishing is never explained.
L’Avventura has a turtle-slow pace that allows us to admire, and then be spooked by the monotony of, the rocky, barren landscapes photographed by Aldo Scavarda. Obviously, Antonioni is juxtaposing these dull environments with the withered souls of his soulless characters. After Anna disappears, a meticulous search begins, but Sandro and Claudia, the two people closest to her, seem chillingly unconcerned. They have an affair together, and their ability (or willingness) to forget Anna is eerie. The fitting pace wearies us, makes us restless, and we, too, begin to forget her.
All the characters seem to be functioning on routines, and everything is like a game to them. They do what seems natural to them at the time in their plastic world; the search is without much passion, and their mission is not so much to find Anna as it is to make the transition from life with her to life without her, and to find something to fill the space she has left. These aristocrats cannot communicate or have meaningful relationships and they are doomed shadows. Sex and money are their ways of speaking to one another, and their communication is futile and repetitious (in one of the first few scenes, Anna and Sandro meet each other for the first time in a long while, and they have bored sex with few words and without tender "I love you"s.)
"Tell me you love me," says Claudia. "I love you," replies Sandro. "Tell me again," she says. "I don’t love you," he answers. Just as the presumably dead Anna felt the need to test and play games with Sandro (that was her only way to connect with him), Sandro and Claudia do the exact same things to each other. They seem apt to self-destruct at any moment, and they enjoy their illusions of pain and love, but are ultimately too shallow and numb to care much. Towards the film’s end, Claudia begins to fear that Anna is alive after all, and we feel that perhaps she is, that she had realized her own society’s pettiness and her realization led to her demise, and that her nightmares of Sandro’s lack of devotion to her have been actualized.
Monica Vitti, as Claudia, has an expressive face that she often twists and bends into an embodiment of superficial happiness or sadness (here, they are often the same thing.) When she’s suffering, she has a Garbo-gleam in her eye that is pure. Claudia, once able to resist Sandro’s advances, now gives into him. L’Avventura is in one way a meditation on a society of bored, isolated people, and in another way, a film about how these people respond to the probability of death while locked in their primitive zones in which they can only react. After Anna’s disappearance, they self-absorbedly drift in and out of trivial topics.
L’Avventura was scorned by the audience at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, and then went on to win a festival award for its distinct new cinematic language and images, and to enjoy box-office success worldwide. European films are, more often than not, moody and heavy (with the exception of Rene Clair and Jacques Tati’s work and those of other foreign comic film artists). Foreign films have always gone deeper into the human psyche and condition than Hollywood ever dared to, because Hollywood, the big movie/money kingdom, has more to lose. Too often, these films (especially some of those by master Bergman) harp upon the inner torments of characters, unintentionally making us laugh at all the bitterness that rings false.
In L’Avventura, we yet again have a film about the wasting away of society, but the film is salvaged by its pace and its lack of gooey pretense, which never allow melodrama or long speeches about the torment. There’s something so refreshingly not condescending about it; Antonioni doesn’t take his audience for fools who need to have everything explained to them. The film is immensely moving, but not in an overwhelming way. Its rhythm is too real to be melodrama, so we cannot connect with it the way we do with easier, less demanding works. It is subtle and does not chew you up and spit you out; the pang of impact comes after the film has finished, once it has been contemplated. It’s almost like a new way of breathing- a new way of feeling- at the movies.
It seems the film’s characters ask the question "why?" a lot. L’Avventura provides no answers to the "why?"s of its audience, and Anna is the first of the film’s principle trio to discover that answers are no use. She is swallowed by the true loneliness of that realization, and so, eventually, are Claudia and Sandro. After speaking sweet nothings to Claudia in their hotel room near the film’s end, Sandro does not return all night. Claudia finds him with a prostitute, and not a word is said for the rest of the movie. Explanations have palled on them, and they finally understand the uselessness of it all. Sandro has cheated not only on Claudia, but yet again on Anna. They remember her, and maybe, for the first time, they can mourn her absence, which they before were hardened to.
The film ends in silence, ambiguously, with Claudia gently comforting Sandro, who is bawling like a child. Aldo Scavarda frames the last shot so beautifully, the simple finale becomes one of the most moving things I have ever felt in cinema. There are no big epiphanies, just a stirring image of two callous aristocrats who are now reduced to crying, helpless children. The image, and the small waves of upfront naturalism that make up L’Avventura, still haunt me.
By Andrew Chan
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