L'avventura

"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.

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

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.

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).