L'AVVENTURA Movie Review

The Adventure

Is it possible to refer to 1960 as just one of those years? It's not every year that sees the release of landmarks like La Dolce Vita, Hiroshima Mon Amour, or Rocco and His Brothers. It was even a great year for popular entertainments like The Apartment, Spartacus, The Entertainer, and even—on a different plane, perhaps—Little Shop of Horrors. All well and good, yet how often in modern times have two films been released in a single year that have altered forever not only the language of cinema itself, but have also influenced for all time the way in which a society views itself? One of these movies, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, introduced Americans to what was to be one of the most turbulent decades in its recent history by unexpectedly replacing the point-of-view of a victim with that of her killer. The other, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, didn't play the commercial movie houses that Hitchcock's film did, yet its influence on popular culture and the intelligentsia was such that it had a trickle down impact that is still with us. A young woman (Lea Massari) on a yachting trip disappears from an island near the Sicilian coast. Her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) go searching for her, and they begin an affair—almost wordlessly—in the emptiness of her absence. The tensions created by Antonioni's stark, barren compositions are, in a sense, the framework of the story he's telling. He depicts a world as vacuum, a world in which sex is the instinctual human response to what we were always told about nature—that it abhors a vacuum. L'Avventura isn't just a picture about the decadent idle rich—it's a vision of a universe without direction, in which the inhabitants who have been unable or unwilling to find a meaning to their existence are drawn into the far easier escape of purely physical coupling. It's a world in which Eros, as the director himself has put it, “is sick.” L'Avventura showed us that the cinema was capable of reinventing itself when necessary in order to express that which can only told through the images and rhythm of film. This script wouldn't have survived a modern story conference, if for no other reason than the “mystery” that Sandro and Claudia initially set out to solve is not only left a mystery at the end, it's forgotten about. L'Avventura, a Rosetta stone for the post-1960 cinema and one of the greatest films of all time, is available in well-mastered letterbox laserdiscs and cassettes.

NEXT STOP … The Eclipse, Red Desert, Landscape in the Mist

1960 145m/C IT Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari, Dominique Blanchar, James Addams; D: Michelangelo Antonioni; W: Tonino Guerra, Michelangelo Antonioni; C: Aldo Scavarda; M: Giovanni Fusco. Cannes Film Festival '60: Special Jury Prize. VHS, LV, Letterbox CVC, VDM, HMV