Die mit der Liebe spielen

Gorgeous film, with devastating commentary on relationships. Early on there is something raw and elemental about the dramatic setting, an island with the sea roaring around its craggy inlets, rock formations that look ancient, and the wind howling as it blows up a storm. The people that have come to this place on a pleasure cruise off the coast of southern Italy are generally all unhappy or dissatisfied, most of them with the person they're in a relationship with. When Anna (Lea Massari) suddenly goes missing, a search ensues.

I loved the premise, and loved even more where the film went from there. Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna's fiancé, begins pursuing her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) from the first day of her absence, which is pretty shocking. And the further the action moves away from the island and we see the other characters either getting on with their lives (most of which involve infidelities of their own), or making what seems to be a pretty distant effort to know what's happening, the more we wonder, but what about Anna? If it were a conventional film, I'd be thinking that given the guy starts dating her girlfriend pretty much immediately after she goes missing, why are the police not investigating him? Or questioning a character named Corrado, who had gone off in a boat to a smaller island right beforehand? But the film is not meant to be a mystery, it's making a point about the human condition.

What does it mean to live one's life how one wants, to seek happiness, and to be able to adapt and move on, things that you might think would all be positive, at least to some degree? Does it mean inherent selfishness, infidelity, and unkindness? And can monogamous relationships survive in a world where little dissatisfactions set in, and there is always another person to be attracted to? I thought the film was well paced and had no issues with its length, as it allows subplots to develop, and the longer it went, the more it caused me to occasionally wonder ... what about Anna? And is this what we do to the people in our lives, pushing them out of mind when it becomes convenient? I loved how the film stayed artistically pure, seeking its vision, without caving in and giving us canned or artificial moments. And in that last moment, what I saw as forgiveness for what is an unforgiveable act ... perhaps it signals something that seems pretty depressing, that infidelity is inevitable, and it takes an almost divine act like that hand on the back of the head to stay together as a couple.

Through it all, director Michelangelo Antonioni gives us a beautiful, beautiful film. His compositions and attention to detail - in grand, sweeping shots and those that are closer - are wonderful. There are countless scenes that are visually appealing, and while it felt like there was a unifying theme in the aesthetic, he seems to experiment a little, such as that great shot from the boat back towards the dock, lightly bobbing with the waves, and the rocky island rising up in the background.

Some other little bits:

• Anna had two books with her on the trip, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Tender is the Night' and the Holy Bible. I liked how the father conveniently disregarded the first, with its themes on the unhappiness in marriage, and took the Bible exclusively to mean that she hadn't committed suicide. We see what we want to see.

• Just as human relationships are subject to impermanence maybe out of neglect, one of the people clumsily drops an ancient vase discovered in one of the island's caves, and it makes no difference to them.

• There is reverence for the freedom and spacing of the architectural style of ancient buildings which have survived, but our lives seem so dreadfully transient in comparison. In one scene Ferzetti's character deliberately tips over an inkwell on an artist's drawing, seemingly out of spite. I wondered if he was jealous of youth, or jealous of having sold out on his old dreams to become more of a businessman than an architect - sensing his own mortality, or his compromises in a too-short life.

• In keeping with the elemental early scenes and the commentary on the fundamental nature of people, there was something primal about the very aggressive southern Italian male gaze from dozens of men in a large crowd around Monica Vitti in one scene, which was very creepy.

• Favorite quote, Anna at about the 25 minute mark:

"I'm distraught. The idea of losing you makes me want to die. And yet I don't feel you anymore." Shortly afterwards, she's gone.

Many of the post-war new wave European directors seemed to have problems making "American Films" that addressed US concerns. Today the distinction no longer arises, media globalisation/colonization being almost complete. But while Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" was a weak attempt at "portraying America", his previous films have become only more relevant, working as effective portraits of very specific modern conditions.

Unlike the neorealist films that he was reacting against, Antonioni's major films don't portray any working class alternatives to the lives of the bourgeoisie. Instead, his films induce a kind of paralysis. They have a noxious and toxic quality, which his characters experience and his audience is forced to share. This paralysis is itself the consequence of what happens when gender stratification and class domination are pushed to the extreme points that they are in a medium-late capitalist society. In other words, Antonioni's internal suffering, his existential nausea, is the precise "subjective" consequence of an "objective" regime of accretion for its own sake.

Antionioni's cinema embalms the viewer in a sort of suffocating subjectivity, until we feel nothing but the neuroticism, narcissism, and cataclysmic disinterest of his characters. And yet, his camera constantly forces us into a distant, almost inhuman, position. It is this strange juxtaposition between an inhuman, almost anthropological distance, and a subjectivity so suicidally sickening, that makes Antonioni's films so unique.

More importantly, it is because of this internal malaise, that Antonioni's characters are constantly on the run. One of man's greatest flaws is his incessant belief that some external flight is capable of inducing some meaningful state of internal happiness. That by retreating to another location, man's problems may disappear. That by superficially changing his environment, escaping to a fantasy world, indulging in physical pleasures or acquiring and accumulating material objects, man may finally be at peace. But time and time again, Antonioni reveals these tactics to be nothing more than temporary distractions.

As such, Antonioni's characters seem to fall into two categories. His Italian trilogy (and Red Desert), for example, focuses on wealthy characters who haven't a financial care in the world. If we think in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then this is a group of people whose requirements - financial, physiological, social or otherwise - are always amply met. But it is precisely because their needs are met, that these characters are trapped in a state of contemplation. They are free to think. And it is precisely this freedom which brings about a painful sort of super-awareness. Rather than struggle to survive, they question their own survival. And so they suffer from self-imposed loneliness, from an inability to connect with other people except on the most superficial level (they stage shark attacks and bouts of sex for quick thrills), and from, not frustration so much as anhedonia, an inability to take pleasure, and also, more shockingly, an inability even to have dreams or desires.

While Antonioni's "wealthy characters" now work as apt stand-ins for post-modern man, for every man and woman in the developed world, Antonioni's English-language films tend to focus on photographers and radicals. That is, they are artists and voyeurs, outside of both paralysis and capitalist logic. They seek to escape their identities, live free on the margins of society, or bring about some social disruption or even revolutionary action. But again, there is no solution. Antonioni's filmography never resolves the problems he tackles.

Unique with Antonioni is the way his characters fail to comfortably inhabit the spaces in which they exist. Antonioni's characters always seem to be in an awkward relationship with their personal environments. They slide within vacant houses, are suffocated by industrial wastelands, search ragged islands, and though they dream of blissful beaches or utopian deserts, there is no escape, only an ever-expanding landscape of paralysis.

And within these spaces, all Antonioni's drama is internal. Antonioni's cinema is a cinema of inaction. Nothing external happens. Instead, we witness the immense tiredness of the human body. We witness the outcome of some unseen drama and the result of some long past trauma. Watch how Antonioni begins his films with relationships, not only long established, but already dissolved. These characters carry the burdens of a complete past history. A history forever unknown to us. Think of "The Passenger" which begins with Jack Nicholson already lost and in the wilderness, or "The Eclipse", which begins with lovers breaking up.

In a sense, Antonioni also predicts the after-glow of the Sexual Revolution. He portrays a universe dominated by the superego injunction "to enjoy". Pleasure is the goal, but partaking in such pleasures, now readily accessible with the collapse of religion, culture and morality, only lead to a callous indifference to pleasure itself. And so we have a desensitisation to pleasure: an inability to find gratification in money, love, ideology or objects.

Monica Vitti, Antonioni's beautiful leading lady, thus becomes a symbol for this dissatisfaction. Antonioni objectifies Vitti, treats her as a pillar of sex and beauty, an object of temptation and ripe possibility, yet simultaneously portrays her as a disinterested and disaffected zombie. Love cannot flourish without sex, but love is impossible precisely because of sex. Sex is thus, to put it in Zizekian terms, simultaneously the condition of the possibility and the impossibility of love.

Unsurprisingly, as we begin the 21st century, the problems faced by Antonioni's middle-aged characters seemed to have been transferred to an even younger generation. Indeed, if Antonioni were making films today, his characters would probably be in their late teens. Perhaps this is why today's younger viewers (the very viewers who would benefit most from his films) find it hard to identify with Antonioni's films. Perhaps what we need is an Antonioni of the 21st century. A younger, hipper Antonioni. The kind of Antonioni that Antonioni tried to be with "Zabriskie Point".

8.5/10 - Masterpiece.

Having recently seen L'Avventura and Scenes from a Marriage back to back they seem as different as it is possible to be. Yet they do share a common ground, namely humanity's quest for love and understanding and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that lie in the way. But whereas Bergman's film has moments of true warmth and happiness, Antonioni's L'Avventura is as brutally cold as a Scandinavian winter.

Plot summary is not entirely important (and would spoil potential surprises), suffice to say that the movie is uniquely structured and may not proceed the way you expect it to. There is a mystery, and romance; but not in any traditional sense. The men and women of this film stumble through a loveless, desolate Italy, occasionally pausing for forced, wretched couplings. Alienation and the inability for humans to connect to one another have never been so painfully presented in film.

While discussing the guilt felt in betraying a mutual friend a woman asks "How can it be that it takes so little to change, to forget?" to which the man responds, "It takes even less." Before one of the films many desperate scenes of impersonal copulation the woman cries out in a fit of existential despair, "I feel as though I don't know you!" to which the man responds, "Aren't you happy? You get to have a new fling." The film is so brutally cynical about friendship, love and human interaction that it feels unreal. Strange alien landscapes, magnificently filmed among the rocky islands around Italy serve to underline the insurmountably barren distances between the characters. And as they grope and fumble for some kind of connection in the darkness that surrounds them, the viewer is pulled into their mire as well.

When they are not desperately searching for some kind of connection with each other, the characters struggle to come to terms with their own absurd existence. A man knocks over a bottle of ink, destroying an art student's in-progress drawing. A woman makes faces in a mirror at herself. Another woman pretends to see a shark in the ocean she is swimming in. None of these distractions are remotely successful.

By the time the film has reached its unbelievably cynical ending (dependant on one of the most effective uses of a musical score in film history), it becomes clear. These people have lost their way.

This overwhelming bleakness seems like it would create an unbearable viewing experience, but there is a truth to it all as well. Companionship is a basic human need, and it can often seem impossibly difficult to form any real connection. However, what is important is that it only seems that way, it is not impossible. Antonioni has shown us only one possible outcome. By watching a movie filled with people slouching towards oblivion, unable to form even the most basic human bond, the mind rebels. There must be another way

L'Avventura (1960)****

Young woman (Lea Massari) suddenly disappears during a boating trip on an inhabited island. Shortly afterward, her boyfriend (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti) became attracted to each other.

However, don't expect the mystery. This is a study of emotional isolation, moral decay, lack of the communication and emptiness of rich people in contemporary (then) society. You can easily be bored by the slow pace and the lack of dramatics of this movie unless you capture its true purpose. This is "state of mind" or experience film rather than conventional plot film. Antonioni practically discovered the new movie language in L'Avventura. By using formal instruments he is expressing emotions of the characters (loneliness, boredom, emptiness and emotional detachment) and the viewer is forced rather to feel this same emotions himself than to be involved in the story and its events. These formal instruments are: slow rhythm, real-time events, long takes, visual metaphors like inhabited island(s), fog, extreme long shots (small characters in panorama) and putting protagonists on inhabited streets or large buildings and landscapes.

Great cinematography. Forms trilogy with La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962).

Several attractive, hip sophisticates set sail on a yacht in the Mediterranean. One of these beautiful people mysteriously disappears. And that sets up the rest of the film's plot.

All of these characters are jaded, haughty, vain, shallow, and self-absorbed. They're preoccupied with romance and their personal feelings toward each other. As a result, I did not find any of them interesting or appealing in the least. Indeed, the Anna character comes across as spoiled, irritable, something of a prima donna; Claudia only slightly less so.

The film's plot is slow, with long camera "takes". In the film's first half, a lot of time is consumed with characters walking around on an island, casually searching for the missing person. In the second half, the plot gets sidetracked, with a sequence or two on "modern" art. This artistic motif has little or nothing to do with the missing person, and thus conveys the impression that the film is being "padded", in an avant-garde sort of way, to prop up the flimsy story concept.

With the howling wind, the crashing of waves against the shore, and rocks falling into the sea, the film has some impressive sound effects. The B&W cinematography is rather conventional, a little disappointing given the lush and exotic locales. Still, the Mediterranean scenery is beautiful in its own right.

With a runtime of well over two hours, a thin storyline, and long drawn-out scenes wherein not much happens, the film comes across as pretentious. This is especially true given that some viewers regard "L'Avventura" as "revolutionary". Maybe it is, in an extremely subtle, artsy sort of way. On the other hand, its reputation may be based more on wishful thinking than on substantive evaluation, given the intellectual audience that this film seeks to impress.