I first saw "L'Avventura" many years after its original release, probably sometime in the late '80's. I don't remember the exact year but it was at the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast and I came out of the cinema entranced, on a high. By then it had already been voted the second greatest film ever made and Vitti's performance lauded as amongst the finest in the movies although by the time I saw it, it had fallen somewhat in the lists of best films. Still, it was and is regarded as a masterpiece and rightly so.
I watched the film again last night for only the second time. It has lost none of its power; it is still entrancing, a film of such visual beauty that it takes your breath away, although it didn't disturb me, (I don't think it ever did). Like Sandro and Claudia, you forget Anna quite quickly. Perhaps I should feel guilty that I did; that a human life meant so little to me, but in Antonioni's scheme of things, that's the way it is. These are indolent, amoral people; they don't have much in their make-up to redeem them, so it is little wonder that you quickly put Anna's disappearance to the back of your mind.
By now, of course, everyone knows this is a film about a girl who vanishes on an island off the coast of Sicily that is nothing more than a crop of rock. Did she commit suicide? Did she fall into the sea? Or did she take a boat and simply take herself off somewhere? (There are numerous 'sightings' of her later in the film). Her lover, Sandro, and her friends search the island for her but she is never seen again. Her vanishing, of course, is not what the film is about. This is not a thriller, but a study in ennui; it is about being bored but it is never boring. It is about amorality and empty lives filled with sex but not with love.
Sandro is the film's 'hero' but he is a sad, vindictive man for whom we feel nothing. The heroine appears, at first, to be Anna, but she too lacks warmth; anything that might draw us to her. Then, like Hitchcock in "Psycho", Antonioni 'kills off' his heroine thirty minutes into the film and the giggling friend in the background moves into the foreground, and Vitti's extraordinary Claudia becomes the heroine.
Like Sandro, and like the audience, she, too, loses interest in the fate of her friend early on. This should diminish her in our eyes but Vitti has a vibrancy and a warmth to her that lifts her character and makes us feel for her. We care what happens to Claudia and despair for her at being let down by Sandro, with whom she has fallen in love. The characters are memorable even if we never grow to like them. Claudia, Sandro and Anna may be at the centre but the bickering couple on the yacht and the island and at the villa and the rich woman and her lover who care about no-one or nothing, (they treat objects and people with equal disdain), are equally central to the 'action'. They have lives, however dull, that transcend the confines of the screen.
Of course, these people are not unique to Antonioni or to "L'Avventura". Directors like Fellini, Bertolucci and Resnais were finding them under every stone and at every strata in society around this time. What anchors Antonioni's film is that no other director, before or since, could place his characters so profoundly within a given space. It was as if his characters were bleeding into their surroundings, (or their surroundings were bleeding into them).
Much has been made of Antonioni's use of architecture and location; the way he places his figures in a landscape, the rooms he chooses to put them in and the way he chooses to photograph those rooms. As the moral fibre of his characters disintegrates, the places in which they move and live take on a strength of character all of their own. That is what I meant when I said that visually the film takes your breath away. Each frame has the quality of a painting that his characters are simply inhabiting. And a word, too, for the performances; they are all superb and Vitti's tragic Claudia, (tragic because she can't break free of her own desires), is the most remarkable of all.
I watched the film again last night for only the second time. It has lost none of its power; it is still entrancing, a film of such visual beauty that it takes your breath away, although it didn't disturb me, (I don't think it ever did). Like Sandro and Claudia, you forget Anna quite quickly. Perhaps I should feel guilty that I did; that a human life meant so little to me, but in Antonioni's scheme of things, that's the way it is. These are indolent, amoral people; they don't have much in their make-up to redeem them, so it is little wonder that you quickly put Anna's disappearance to the back of your mind.
By now, of course, everyone knows this is a film about a girl who vanishes on an island off the coast of Sicily that is nothing more than a crop of rock. Did she commit suicide? Did she fall into the sea? Or did she take a boat and simply take herself off somewhere? (There are numerous 'sightings' of her later in the film). Her lover, Sandro, and her friends search the island for her but she is never seen again. Her vanishing, of course, is not what the film is about. This is not a thriller, but a study in ennui; it is about being bored but it is never boring. It is about amorality and empty lives filled with sex but not with love.
Sandro is the film's 'hero' but he is a sad, vindictive man for whom we feel nothing. The heroine appears, at first, to be Anna, but she too lacks warmth; anything that might draw us to her. Then, like Hitchcock in "Psycho", Antonioni 'kills off' his heroine thirty minutes into the film and the giggling friend in the background moves into the foreground, and Vitti's extraordinary Claudia becomes the heroine.
Like Sandro, and like the audience, she, too, loses interest in the fate of her friend early on. This should diminish her in our eyes but Vitti has a vibrancy and a warmth to her that lifts her character and makes us feel for her. We care what happens to Claudia and despair for her at being let down by Sandro, with whom she has fallen in love. The characters are memorable even if we never grow to like them. Claudia, Sandro and Anna may be at the centre but the bickering couple on the yacht and the island and at the villa and the rich woman and her lover who care about no-one or nothing, (they treat objects and people with equal disdain), are equally central to the 'action'. They have lives, however dull, that transcend the confines of the screen.
Of course, these people are not unique to Antonioni or to "L'Avventura". Directors like Fellini, Bertolucci and Resnais were finding them under every stone and at every strata in society around this time. What anchors Antonioni's film is that no other director, before or since, could place his characters so profoundly within a given space. It was as if his characters were bleeding into their surroundings, (or their surroundings were bleeding into them).
Much has been made of Antonioni's use of architecture and location; the way he places his figures in a landscape, the rooms he chooses to put them in and the way he chooses to photograph those rooms. As the moral fibre of his characters disintegrates, the places in which they move and live take on a strength of character all of their own. That is what I meant when I said that visually the film takes your breath away. Each frame has the quality of a painting that his characters are simply inhabiting. And a word, too, for the performances; they are all superb and Vitti's tragic Claudia, (tragic because she can't break free of her own desires), is the most remarkable of all.