359. L'Avventura (The Adventure) (1960)

Directed By Michelangelo Antonioni

Synopsis

A woman and her lover plus her close friend, plus some other friends go on a yacht tour of the islands. The woman gets lost. Her lover and her friend start getting it on after her disappearance. What happened to her? You'll have to watch the film not to find out!

Review

Of the three films that helped redefine Italian cinema for the 60s, the others being Rocco e Suoi Fratelli and La Dolce Vita, L'Avventura is the less interesting of the three. Still, it does a couple of interesting things.

First you are misdirected into thinking someone is a protagonist while in reality she disappears off the screen quite early on. Antonioni manages to make her still present throughout in the mind of those who were around her and her presence is felt all the way through the film. Second, the ending is supremely unsatisfying for a film that again misdirects you into thinking it is a mystery film.

The film is shot in some beautiful locations around Mediterranean islands and the acting is quite good. Monica Vitti is particularly stunning. That being said, for a film which presumes to explore human emotion and relationships, the characters show little emotional evolution, they just shift gears suddenly, which for a film which lasts 2 and a half hours and has little action other than the inner life of the characters is really unnecessary. For example Vitti's character goes from distraught to amorous to angry to forgiving without having any stages in between, it just does not ring true, well she does rebuke the guy's advances for the whole of 2 minutes.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Released in 1960 the film was booed by some members of the audience during its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (Antonioni and Vitti fled the theatre) but after a second screening it won the Special Jury Prize and went on to both international box office success and what has since been described as "hysteria." This controversy carried on for decades. L'Avventura influenced the visual language of cinema, forever changing how subsequent movies looked and has been named by some critics as one of the best ever made, but has been criticized by others for its seemingly uneventful plot and slow pacing along with the existentialist themes, which even stirred the "waggishly dismissive epithet of Antoniennui."

It's online, but you need to get Italian: