L'Avventura (1960), which translates to "the adventure," is a landmark film in the international art cinema for its dramatically unconventional storyline, which rambles from Sandro and Claudia's search for Anna, to their own developing love affair. Eventually the film becomes a more amorphous tale of human alienation and incommunicability.
Long before it was fashionable, film pioneer Michelangelo Antonioni trafficked in a kind of modern ennui later examined by contemporary directors like Neil LaBute and Steven Soderbergh. Critic Pauline Kael called the film "upper-class neo-realism -- the poetry of moral and spiritual poverty." The film marked the initial collaboration between Antonioni and stage actress Monica Vitti, who, like Jean-Luc Godard's Anna Karina or Josef von Sternberg's Marlene Dietrich, would go on to appear as Antonioni's muse in a number of productions and to embody his mood of troubled alienation.
That failure of characters to connect was a theme Antonioni masterfully reiterated in the look of L'Avventura, a film as visually innovative as it was thematically rich. Refusing to use conventions of the classical Hollywood cinema like point-of-view shots, Antonioni thus frustrated his audience's identification with his characters. Using the widescreen frame to effective ends, Antonioni had his actors spread out across the frame to emphasize their physical and emotional distance from each other. Such existential chilliness could also be attributed to a production that ran months over schedule, so that summer scenes had to be shot in wintertime.
L'Avventura was the first film in Antonioni's loose trilogy including La Notte (1961) and The Eclipse (1962), films which shared a thematic interest in what critic William S. Pechter calls "the death of feeling."
For Pechter, "L'Avventura's importance lies not in any technical innovation but in its giant appropriation for the film medium of a territory of psychological subtlety and emotional nuance previously thought exclusively to belong to the novel."
When it was screened at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, L'Avventura was greeted with hisses and boos. Present at that screening, critic Penelope Houston was disturbed to note audience members yelling "cut!" when shots were thought to go on too long and jeering rudely during love scenes. Though he had made five previous films, that volatile Cannes screening signaled Antonioni's true arrival on the international film scene. And despite that angry reception, he later won both a Cannes Special Jury Award and the Critics' Award. Unused to the free-form, unresolved structure of the film and Antonioni's refusal to court emotional involvement with his protagonists, audiences and some critics often found the film frustratingly incomprehensible and pretentious. Many remarked upon the frustration of Claudia and Sandro eventually giving up their search for Anna, and a sense of disconnection between the film's initial promised "adventure," and the bulk of the film, which never returns to that mystery. That free-form structure was acknowledged as a conscious working method by Antonioni who conceded "I never know where I will arrive with a picture."
Befuddling to audiences and offensive to censors, the distinct moral ambiguity of L'Avventura earned the film a "condemned" rating by the National League of Decency, obviously due in part to the joyless, mechanical way that many of the characters go about lovemaking. Many were simply perplexed by the film, including the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther who wrote in his review "What Michelangelo Antonioni ... is trying to get across in this highly touted Italian mystery drama is a secret he seems to be determined to conceal from the audience."
Yet, despite the initially hostile reception of the film, 35 critics and filmmakers including Roberto Rossellini recognized the unprecedented artistic vision of L'Avventura and issued a statement of support for this misunderstood film. In France, it was one of the biggest commercial successes of the year. Today L'Avventura is considered a masterpiece, and has been declared one of the ten best films of all time in a Sight and Sound International Critics Poll.
Producer: Cino del Duca
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cinematography: Aldo Scavarda
Production Design: Piero Poletto
Music: Giovanni Fusco
Cast: Monica Vitti (Claudia), Gabriele Ferzetti (Sandro), Lea Massari (Anna), Dominique Blanchar (Giulia), James Addams (Corrado), Renzo Ricci (Anna's Father).
BW&C-144m. Letterboxed.
by Felicia Feaster
