Die mit der Liebe spielen

"L'avventura" is Michelangelo Antonioni's mind-blowing film about nothing. No, I don't mean "nothing happens." On the contrary it has a suspenseful story which, in the hands of someone like David Fincher, would be a steamy heart-pounding thriller. A girl goes mysteriously missing on a remote Italian island while her fiancé and her best friend have a mystery of their own. A ton happens. But the movie is about "nothing" - the palpable spectre of oblivion, the unknown, and hollow faith that haunts us all.

Antonioni made the statement at Cannes: "Today the world is endangered by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice or sheer laziness (...) Moral man, who has no fear of the scientific unknown, is today afraid of the moral unknown."

In other words, he is saying we have accepted the scientific unknown (an infinitely unknown universe) and embraced it exploration into the future, but in terms of morality we cling to traditional, archaic stereotypes of the past. There are definitely religious overtones in images of empty churches, but specifically the film focuses on the institution of marriage and the concept of everlasting love which, when not attained, leads people to misery; yet we cling to it "out of cowardice or sheer laziness."

"L'avventura" focuses on the inherent "nothing" of love. It opens on a woman bidding farewell to her father in a very cold, emotionless way as he himself conducts a soulless business deal--selling their sprawling property to be razed and turned into cheap apartments. She then goes to meet her lover whom she hasn't seen in a month, but at the last minute she decides she'd rather go have coffee by herself because she prefers the feeling of being without him. The story unfolds as they and a group of other wealthy Italian couples take a boat to an isolated island, and on the way over we quickly learn that each couple is a loveless marriage with each person barely tolerating if not despising their spouse. And yet they remain together out of cowardice or sheer laziness.

Then the film does something absolutely brilliant to illustrate this concept of "nothing". About 30 minutes into the story, the entire plot disappears. Literally we are left without a plot, without a protagonist, and with nothing but a bunch of characters stumbling around trying to figure out what to do next. If you're not prepared for this shift you may end up frustrated or hating the movie because suddenly there's no point. But "no point" *is* the point.

As the characters lead a lukewarm effort to search for their missing companion (symbolically, the plot) they become increasingly apathetic toward the whole tragedy, and instead they resume their miserable lives, their loveless pairings, and their general lazy adherence to the way things always were. And in this way Antonioni illustrates what he said at Cannes. When faced with the moral unknown, rather than seizing and exploring it as we would with science, we fall back on familiar, tired patterns.

The film then breaks off to follow 2 characters in their half-hearted search. They travel through wonderfully surreal settings: towns that are completely deserted, or the opposite: a chaotic spectacle of hundreds of lusty men chasing after a pretty girl who has ripped her skirt. All of these scenes are majestically and gorgeously shot, and even if you don't immediately grasp the symbolism, you can't help but be stunned at how gripping the images are.

Initially booed by the audience at its premiere, "L'avventura" is definitely a challenging film. It gives us a plot but then rips the plot out from under us, replacing it with another, and then even that plot gradually sinks into a "love story". But if you're paying attention, you can guess that even the love story is ephemeral and fleeting. When the final, breathtaking scene ends, come back here and re-read the Antonioni quote (or better yet, search for the whole text and read it all) and you'll get it. "L'avventura" is about nothing.

At some point in the film Monica Vitti turns to her love partner and passionately proclaims "I want to see clearly!". They're standing atop a convent, and saying this, accidentally she tugs on a rope. Bells go off around them. A moment later, from a church in the distance bells ring back an answer.

Wow.

And so finally I arrive at the end of my Antonioni quest going backwards in time from The Passenger, back at the start. This will not be the last of his films that I see, but I feel I've reached a point that enables closure. I'm where it all began, in the craving mind, where all the formations of life and cinema are born. I will rest from my travel here, with the magnitude of this film.

But L'Avventura is famously a mystery of disappearance, so why do I speak in the title of this review of 'appearances'?

Perhaps because, in the aftermath of that disappearance, Antonioni sketches for us the first appearance of desire. Romance in his later films was already stale or not allowed to blossom (it appears again in Zabriskie Point, under a different context), but here feelings are pursued, in an effort to reflect if love can be our saving grace.

That appearance, born in a barren rock in the middle of the sea, rests on a twofold interpretation.

On one level, perhaps in understanding by Anna's inexplicable disappearance the precarious balance in which hangs our fleeting existence, the randomly cruel laws that govern it, the two partners turn to each other for solace. And perhaps more, seeing deep down in their own selves how quick life can be forgotten, how everything we hold to matter ultimately matters little and how this speck of life we value is merely transient and will come to pass, they turn to each other to desperately defy it, to prove to each other and the world that love cannot simply vanish.

Antonioni frames first this realization of transience against the elements of nature, the imperishable, secondly he frames, traps, blocks within the desperate relationship, mostly faces in silhouette, against old medieval buildings, man's folly to mimic the imperishable. This is Antonioni's spatial stroke of genius, the visual vocabulary which he consistently executed for the rest of his career.

But whereas in the subsequent films I was fascinated with the abstraction of human struggle, here I'm also fascinated with the struggle itself of human beings fumbling in the dark. The woman cautious of love at first, then allowing herself to be swept in it, believing if something can make her "see clearly" that it should be love. The man pushing obsessively for that love then, having consummated the need, conquered his prey, losing interest, aimlessly wandering the streets. The sated beast now becomes casually destructive, as we're shown in the scene where for no reason he spills ink over a young man's drawing.

Antonioni fills this with portents and divinations, like the woman's premonition that Anna has returned.

More subtle sketch of the madness of desire is the surreal scene where a mob in the grip of sexual paroxysm gathers in the street to ogle at a beautiful woman. Monica Vitti's character later experiences the same oppressiveness of the "male gaze", yet doesn't feel threatened by it, until her man emerges from a building, at which point she runs and hides.

The finale in this sense is a poignant enigma like few in cinema, the smile of a Mona Lisa. The two lovers, now bitterly broken by how their desire has failed them, stand in a plaza with the view of a mountain in the horizon. The woman lays a hand on the man's head, but is the gesture forgiveness or reproach and is she telling him to stay or absolving him to go?

Rushing back through his career, a chronicle emerges. Here the appearance of desire in the hope that it will liberate, later the failure of that desire to liberate, the willingness to not pursue it at all in L'Eclisse. Later yet, the liberation from desire, the realization in Deserto Rosso that we need to make ourselves whole from within, the chimera of the mind in Blowup and the liberation from it, the chimera of ideas in Zabriskie Point and the liberation from it, until the eventual, stunning to behold emergence of nirvana in The Passenger. A state of awareness where all bonds to clinging and desire are severed, the illusions of ego and identity dissolved, the characters now embracing their transience.

This is why Antonioni matters to me. Not because Kubricks, Polanskis, and Peter Weirs all took from him, planting seeds in the fertile ground of his cinema, and not because he did more for cinema as we know it than all of them together, but because his enduring legacy, mastery of medium, conceptual exploration of ideas, all of this cannot fully account for the experience of the spiritual journey they enable. Which is to say that something elusive exists embedded in the frame, a true perception, that makes his films mysteriously extend into the soul.

Antonioni saw further perhaps than any other director, before or after.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Italian economy had already started stabilising and moving away from the devastating consequences of WWII. The stabilisation and subsequent economic growth took place through rapid and widespread industrialisation. One can also clearly notice a shift in the sensibilities in the Italian films which were made during these years by acclaimed filmmakers like Antonioni, Fellini, Ermanno Olmi, etc. Their films shifted away from the concerns of neorealist films of the 1940s and early 50s. In this context, it is very interesting to note the dissimilarities between a typical Italian neorealist film and a post-neorealist film like 'L'Avventura'. While Neorealism dealt with the economic fallout of WWII, 'L'Avventura' deals with a sense of disillusionment in the midst of rapid industrialisation(the very first line of dialogue revolves around how the natural woods are being being replaced by houses). While Neorealism focused on the poor working class Italians, 'L'Avventura' focuses on the privileged upper class or the bourgeois section of the Italian society.

From a technical standpoint, it has to be said that 'L'Avventura' is exquisitely shot. The camera movements and numerous tracking shots are executed with a distinct sophistication and methodical precision. There are a lot of complex frame compositions that take place in the interior scenes which scream perfectionism on the part of Antonioni. The overall tone for the film is one of extreme austerity. This austerity and lack of humanity to the film is clearly meant to represent the supposed lack of humanity in the midst of mindless industrialisation and consumerism. I think one thing that the viewer has to assume in order to buy into the film's plot and story elements is that the film takes place in Antonioni's own world which is a little different to the real world. This is because accepting the reaction of some of the characters to certain occurrences in the film will involve a certain amount of the suspension of disbelief.

The problem I had with 'L'Avventura' is that after a while, the relentless austerity started to get a little unbearable and tough to be receptive to. It's interesting because I know the austerity is absolutely deliberate and it's intended to epitomise the ennui that the characters get afflicted by along with Antonioni's own idea of the blandness and aimlessness of life in contemporary industrialised Italy of the early 60s. The first hour of the film is absolutely spectacular and rich with abstract existentialist intrigue. But once the group leaves the island and we re-enter civilisation, the film gets progressively less intriguing for me. I generally don't get negatively affected by the austerity of Kubrick or Bergman. But the second half of this film really started to progressively weigh me down.

I don't think any acting performance in the film is particularly special. But of course Monica Vitti offers vulnerability and a sensitive touch to her character and she is the only one that the viewer can find any reason to sympathise with. But to be honest, it is clear that Antonioni is in no mood to make any character singularly likable.

Overall 'L'Avventura' is a film that clearly shows a master at work who clearly has a visual flair and a philosophical voice. But the austerity and lack of humanity in the film makes it tough to rewatch and revisit too often.

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