The melancholy of adventures.

L' Avventura  (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

Straightforwardly translated, Michaelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura means the adventure, or as the film narrates, a series of adventures. Interestingly, in Italian, the term also refers loosely to brief sexual encounters, one-night stands, “the terra incognito of strangers feigning intimacy as they try to find love without moral compasses”, Sohlman (2004) in his Senses of Cinema review writes. The Criterion Collection edition of the film starts with the recognition Cannes Special Jury Prize, evidently, the “for the new language of film and the beauty of its images” sort of cements the inevitable praise the film has heaped despite its negative reception at its world premiere.

This is my first viewing of the film, or any Antonioni material for that matter, but admittedly it would be a chore to intentionally re-view the two-and-a-half length of it even for the purpose of probing through its rich content and dense melding of symbolisms and its subtexts. For a very intriguing opening premise, it also kind of drags its way into intolerable length and unforeseeable end. But that is what’s great about European cinema, more notably the nouvelle vague and the rise of Italian luminaries such as Fellini and Antonioni, and most importantly during this cinematic era, because films like L’Avventura leave so much a venue for boundless discussions and exploration into the art form.

The first part concerns the mysterious disappearance (and search) of Anna (Lea Massari) in an equally mysterious island off Sicily in the Aeolian Sea. She is flanked with a bunch of supposedly rich class friends along with her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti). The search trails off into a trivial matter and is altogether brushed off as the narrative shifts into Sandro’s pursuit for Claudia and her submission to the playboy architect. From then on, the ‘sexual adventurism’ attachment is depicted in an isolated encounter with the sexpot Gloria Perkins who caused a commotion of the male populace, the sexual fling between a young painter and disgruntled younger wife of an old but rich man, and Sandro and Claudia’s love affair. The film ends yet with another astounding photographic composition, but one that leaves with so much profundity.

When finished, I initially thought that Antonioni wanted to show a humanistic side to isolation, emotional alienation to put it more extensively. I would like to think that as individuals, at some point, we remain emotionally distant to one another despite the intimacy of our relationships or the lack of it. This is depicted in the dynamics between Claudia and Anna and Claudia and Sandro, and putting it in the milieu of the ominous barren islands, the lingering melancholy of the Italian landscape and the forgotten but emphatic array of old Catholic churches serves its metaphorical dialectics. True enough, L’Avventura is first of Antonioni’s foray into the subject of ‘existential alienation’ which would continue with La Notte and L’eclisse.

Sohlman (2004) in Senses of Cinema expounds more on the interior realism aspect of Antonioni’s exposition. The director seemed to be more concerned of depicting a side to humanism that is apt to the current social and spiritual milieu of Italy that period. A kind of spiritual barrenness that is marked by the “absence of traditional moral restraints” where one is leaning more to the “temporal and hedonistic” thus a kind of sexual liberation we see in the submission of the characters to unbridled desires, but just like its loose Italian reference to one-night stand, brief yet leaving us in a state of utter sadness and listlessness.

Having read that, I was almost tempted to categorise it to the more popular term cinema of the intent, where audiences rarely delve as it treads on touchy territory from the profound, suggestive to even speculative. (Dan Schneider in Unspoken Cinema, in the DVD review of the film points out that “intent is meaningless”.) Recently, we are reminded of the very recent Babel who made buzz at 2006 Cannes and won Best Director for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, not to mention heaped Oscar nominations. While Babel is entirely different from L’Avventura, it fares comparatively with the stunning visuals and the beauty of its isolated scenes. Inarittu, receiving the Golden Globe for Best Picture, explains that really, the film is about compassion and the collective miasma of yearning to communicate, or something to that extent, though it received a varied response from critics and non-critics alike. Interestingly, it was at the Cannes premiere when the L’Avventura was reportedly booed that Antonioni explained that “this new man is burdened with the heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but unsuited and inadequate.”

Towards the end Claudia lays her hand, after much uncertainty, to the weeping Sandro’s shoulder, seemingly oblivious to the bastard’s two-timing stint, the cinematic translation of forgiveness. And time and again, despite the jarring circumstance we have indulged ourselves with, just like the contemplative bores that we are, we find ourselves lured and ready to take in more.