L’Avventura (1960) Review

A group of wealthy Italians sail to a volcanic island in the Aeolians. One of them, Anna, disappears. The film spends the next ninety minutes on the search and then stops caring, and so do the searchers.

The audience at Cannes jeered and whistled through the screening. The jury gave it a special prize the same week for the beauty of its images and its new cinematic language, and a group of critics signed a public statement defending it.

Both reactions are correct and the film has been getting both ever since.

The 8 is for a film that broke a rule most people didn’t know was optional, and did it in 1960 instead of after somebody else had. The mystery is real and it’s never solved because solving it would be answering the wrong question. It’s slow in a way that will lose viewers, and it means to be.

The Disappearance Is the Method

Anna vanishes on the island and the first act behaves exactly like a mystery. There’s a search, there’s a boat, there are police, there’s a storm, there are theories about a passing yacht and about smugglers.

Then Claudia and Sandro, Anna’s best friend and her fiancé, begin an affair with each other while ostensibly looking for her, and the search becomes a pretext neither of them bothers to maintain past the halfway point.

The film’s argument is that these people cannot hold on to anything, including grief, and the missing woman is the proof. She’s effectively forgotten inside a week by both of the people who claimed to love her.

What makes it work instead of merely provocative is that Antonioni doesn’t condemn them. Claudia is troubled by her own behavior and says so, repeatedly, and does it anyway. She’s not a hypocrite, she’s a person discovering that her feelings have less durability than she assumed.

The famous detail is that Anna isn’t mentioned at all in the final third. Not once. The film simply stops referring to her. That’s what the characters have done, and the absence is louder than any scene about it.

Antonioni has said he’d no ending in mind for the disappearance and never considered supplying one, and that people asking what happened to Anna had watched a different film from the one he made.

The Landscape Does the Emotion

The island is volcanic rock with no shelter, no soft edges and nowhere to sit, and Antonioni shoots it as a place actively hostile to human presence.

Then the film moves to the mainland and the settings change but the principle doesn’t. Empty piazzas. An unfinished building. A hotel corridor. A town built for people who never arrived. Every composition puts figures small and off to one side, in spaces too large for them, frequently with their backs turned.

That’s where the alienation lives. Almost nobody in the film says how they feel, and the film is never in doubt about it, because the framing has already told you.

The sequence in the abandoned town of Noto is the whole thesis in one location. Sandro and Claudia walk through a place with buildings and streets and no inhabitants, and the emptiness isn’t symbolic. It’s simply where they are.

Aldo Scavarda shot it and the deep-focus compositions mean the background is always as sharp as the foreground, so you cannot look away from the space the characters are failing to fill.

There’s also almost no score. The sound is wind, sea, footsteps and traffic, which removes the one tool most films use to tell you what to feel.

Sandro Is the Point

Gabriele Ferzetti plays a man who trained as an architect, gave it up to do valuations for other people’s buildings, and knows precisely what he traded away.

The scene where he deliberately spills ink across a young architect’s drawing is the film’s clearest moment. He does it almost casually, apologizes, and cannot explain himself. It’s the act of a man who cannot bear to see somebody still trying.

That’s what he does to Claudia too. He pursues her, gets her, and then betrays her within days with a woman he’s no interest in, because having something is intolerable to him.

Antonioni is precise that the problem isn’t immorality. Sandro is capable of feeling and cannot sustain it. That’s a different and more modern affliction. He’s not a seducer, he’s a man with no capacity for duration.

The affair with Claudia begins about forty minutes after Anna vanishes and the film doesn’t present this as shocking. It presents it as what happens.

Monica Vitti’s performance is the counterweight and it made her a star. Claudia is the only person in the film with a working conscience, and the film’s cruelty is that having one doesn’t stop her doing anything.

The Ending Is the Gesture

Sandro betrays Claudia almost immediately after they’ve committed to each other, with a call girl, in a hotel lounge, and she finds him.

He weeps, on a bench, facing away from her, and she stands behind him and puts her hand on the back of his head.

That’s it. No dialogue, no forgiveness spoken, no resolution. Two people who have both proved they’re incapable of what they claimed to want, and one small gesture of pity that resolves nothing and forgives nothing.

The shot holds. Behind them is a wall on one side and Mount Etna in the distance on the other, and the composition splits the frame so that each of them occupies a different world.

It’s one of the least consoling endings in cinema and it’s not cruel. It’s accurate about what these two have left, which is a small amount of mutual pity and no prospect of anything better.

Antonioni went on to make La Notte and L’Eclisse, and the three are usually treated as a trilogy about the same subject. This is the best of them and the most watchable, which is a low bar he clears comfortably.

Why It Was Booed

The 1960 audience arrived expecting a mystery and were given a film that abandons its premise, which no mainstream European release had done before.

It’s also two and a quarter hours long, has very little dialogue, no score to speak of, and long passages in which people walk. The projection at Cannes was reportedly poor, which didn’t help.

The defense came fast. A statement signed by around thirty-five critics and industry figures was issued during the festival, and the jury’s citation is close to an apology for the audience.

Within a decade it was on international best-of lists and it’s stayed there. Sight and Sound has had it in the top ten more than once.

The interesting part is that both reactions were responses to the same quality. What the audience experienced as tedium and betrayal is exactly what the critics identified as a new language, and neither group was mistaken about what the film was doing.

That’s the useful thing to take from it. A genuinely new formal choice will be experienced as incompetence by a substantial share of any first audience, and there’s no version of the film that avoids this while remaining the film.

Should you watch L’Avventura?

Yes, if you can accept that the mystery is a device instead of a plot. It’s slow, quiet and long, and if you spend it waiting to find out what happened to Anna you’ll have a miserable time. Watch the compositions and watch how quickly two people stop mentioning a third.

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