L’Avventura (1960) Review

Official trailer

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.

I admire this film more than I enjoy every minute of it. The first act hooks me like any good mystery, and when it becomes clear Antonioni has no intention of finding Anna, I go from annoyed to absorbed.

The length is the reservation I can’t shake. There are stretches of walking I’d happily trim, even knowing he wants me to feel every one of those minutes.

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 can’t 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 provoking is that Antonioni doesn’t condemn them. Claudia’s own behavior troubles her. She says so repeatedly and does it anyway. She’s discovering that her feelings have less durability than she assumed, and I find that more unsettling than any villainy the film could have handed her.

The famous detail is that Anna isn’t mentioned at all in the final third. Not once. The film stops referring to her. The characters have done the same, and the absence is louder than any scene about it. Antonioni has said he had no ending in mind for the disappearance and never considered supplying one. He has also said 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.

The compositions carry the alienation. 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 is 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 can’t look away from the space the characters are failing to fill.

Scavarda’s photography is the reason I’ll sit through the slow patches. Those tiny figures in huge, empty frames tell me more about these people than any line of dialogue does, and I think I could watch the Noto sequence with the sound off and still feel the whole film. There’s also almost no score. The sound is wind, sea, footsteps and traffic. That 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 exactly 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 can’t explain himself. It’s the act of a man who can’t 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 has no interest in, because having something is intolerable to him. Antonioni is precise about the problem. Sandro is capable of feeling and can’t sustain it. That’s a different and more modern affliction than immorality. 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. Vitti is the reason the film works for me. Without her, I’d be watching a room full of hollow rich people and wondering why I should care. With her, there’s one person who feels the wrongness of it all, and watching her do the wrong thing anyway is painful in a way I find hard to shake.

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. This ending is the best thing in the film for me. That hand on the back of his head wrecks me. There’s no comfort in it and no cruelty either. What’s left is an accurate picture of what these two have: a little 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. That’s 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. That 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. 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. I get why that Cannes crowd whistled. Two and a quarter hours of people walking is a lot to ask, and I still find the middle stretch long. I side with the critics anyway, because there’s no version of this film that avoids that reaction and stays the film.

Should you watch L’Avventura?

Yes, if you can accept that the mystery is a device.

I rate it an 8 because the images, Vitti and that final gesture stay with me long after it ends, and it loses points because the length asks more patience than the film always repays. 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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