Film review

  • L’avventura

    Old YorkerFilm review

    The Adventure

    Michelangelo Antonioni (1960)

    Fellini’s La dolce vita and Antonioni’s L’avventura are often considered a pair – both regarded as classics of post-war Italian cinema, both concerned with well-heeled characters whose glamour and appetites cloak anxiety and spiritual insufficiency, both released in the same year.  Watching L’avventura again, I found myself comparing it with another famous, apparently very different, 1960 release – Hitchcock’s Psycho.   In each case, the young woman who has been the main focus of the early action suddenly isn’t there any more, even though the effects of these removals, for the films’ first audiences, would have contrasted sharply.  Anna, who looks set to be the protagonist of L’avventura, is played by Lea Massari; unlike Janet Leigh, Massari wasn’t the best-known member of the cast.  Whereas Leigh’s Marion Crane is shockingly murdered, Massari’s Anna simply disappears.  Or, rather, not simply – which hints at something else that the films both have in common and places them poles apart.  Antonioni, like Hitchcock (and to quote him), plays ‘the audience like a piano’ – but does so by exploiting our expectations that a mystery will be solved.

    Those expectations don’t, of course, apply in the case of experienced Antonioni viewers – of whom I wasn’t one when I first watched L’avventura in 2004.  (I’d seen only The Passenger, around the time of its original release, and more or less forgotten it.)  Since then, I’ve seen four more of Antonioni’s sixteen features – Cronaca di un amore, La notte, L’eclisse and Blow-Up.  A viewer familiar with the last three of these wouldn’t expect a straightforward explanation of Anna’s vanishing.  The narrative of L’avventura (with a screenplay by the director, Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra) goes through the motions of investigating whether she has drowned, either accidentally or intentionally, in the sea off the Aeolian Islands, or been kidnapped by a group of smugglers.  But this is lip service to the conventions of a puzzling disappearance story.  Anna disappears primarily in order for Antonioni to explore the impact of her absence, what this says about the moral character of those who knew her and, in particular, how much and for how long she continues to matter to her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), a lothario architect, and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti).  Sandro is ready before Claudia to have a sexual relationship but the mutual attraction between them is soon obvious.  Claudia’s feelings of loyalty to Anna and of guilt about betraying her are only temporary.

    An audience’s view that Sandro and Claudia have a moral responsibility to (and to try to find) Anna may persist for longer but is always shadowed by the impression she has made.  Anna seems drawn to Sandro largely because her unpleasant father (Renzo Ricci) is hostile to the match, and indifferent when she and Sandro make love in their hotel room before setting off with Claudia for their Mediterranean holiday, on a wealthy couple’s yacht.  On the first morning of the holiday, Anna dives impulsively into the sea.  After swimming for a while, she cries out that she’s seen a shark.  Sandro swims out to her rescue.  Back on the boat, Anna confides to Claudia that the shark was an invention.  Sandro isn’t wide of the mark when, in conversation with Claudia shortly after Anna’s disappearance, he says that she ‘seemed to feel that our love for her – mine, yours, even her father’s, in a certain sense – weren’t enough for her, or didn’t mean much to her’.  Even while those she left behind and the viewer are missing Anna’s presence, the disaffection she has shown precludes any deeper sense of loss or tragedy.  It anticipates and almost vindicates how quickly she’s forgotten.

    The first part of L’avventura is absorbing, especially the sequences on the yacht, the persistent low throb of the craft’s motor contributing strongly to the ominous mood.  The film was notorious in 1960 for its repeated uneventful passages; Antonioni also received praise for creating a cinematic equivalent of the nouveau roman (a year before Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leading exponents of that literary form, collaborated with Alain Resnais on Last Year at Marienbad).  There’s no doubt that L’avventura proved influential, though that’s something of a backhanded compliment.  Pauline Kael, who was much impressed at the time, wrote retrospectively (and judged fairly) that ‘There had been nothing like it before, and it isn’t fair to blame this movie for all the elegant sleepwalking and desolation that followed’.  That sleepwalking and desolation still meant, though, that L’avventura, on this repeat viewing, paid gradually diminishing returns.  This wasn’t only because I knew what was (not) going to happen but also because the look and feel of the piece – the gazing (as if spellbound) camera, the stylish languor and underlying futility, the characters’ lack of commitment – are less distinctive once subsequent Antonioni films have lodged in your memory.

    Even so, this is still an unusually imposing film – thanks chiefly to its sustained visual authority (the black-and-white cinematography is by Aldo Scavarda).  Antonioni expresses a remarkable sensitivity to physical scale (and the moral and psychological dimensions implied in such scale) – from the narrow corridors of a villa to clusters of buildings to sea and sky.  There are imaginative, unaccountable moments – as when Sandro and Claudia go onto a church roof, she accidentally tugs on a rope that sounds the bells, and these are answered by the connected bells of another church.  While Lea Massari leaves the strongest impression, Gabriele Ferzetti is thoroughly convincing as the congenitally inconstant Sandro.   Monica Vitti is a fabulous camera subject and magnetic except in moments when she’s evidently trying to act.   Two uncredited actors[1] are striking in cameos as a shopkeeper and his wife, who may or may not have seen Anna after she disappeared.

    22 January 2019

    [1] I’d guess from the IMDB cast listing (but it is only a guess) that they may be Giovanni Danesi and Rita Molè.

  • That Hamilton Woman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Korda (1941)

    The only film in which Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh appeared together while they were married – and a distinctive confection.   The title seems to refer to the notorious public reputation of Emma Hamilton, to hint at an exploration of who she was behind that reputation.  (The picture’s theatrical release poster reinforced this by adding an exclamation mark after the title.)  Vivien Leigh’s Emma is, most of the time, the protagonist.  But when That Hamilton Woman got made skews the latter part of the narrative in a big way.  What can only be called a sea change occurs when the stuffy admiralty informs Nelson (Olivier) of a peace treaty between Britain and France (presumably the Treaty of Amiens in 1802).  He angrily responds that:

    ‘… you will never make peace with Napoleon!  Napoleon cannot be master of the world until he has smashed us up, and believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world!  You cannot make peace with dictators.  You have to destroy them, wipe them out!’

    The film’s first audiences knew well that Nelson had someone other than Napoleon in mind.

    According to Wikipedia, Alexander Korda’s film, which opened in America in spring 1941 and in Britain the summer of that year, drew the ire of the isolationist America First Committee (AFC), who objected to a picture that ‘seemed to be preparing America for war’.  (Others in the same AFC category included the previous year’s Foreign Correspondent and The Great Dictator.)   Korda, accused of ‘operating an espionage and propaganda center for Britain in the United States’, was due to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 12 December 1941.   The appointment was cancelled following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor five days beforehand.  That Hamilton Woman is famous as Winston Churchill’s favourite film.  Although the screenplay is credited to Walter Reisch and R C Sherriff, it’s even been suggested that Churchill was the author of Nelson’s patriotic speeches.

    It’s not surprising that the several different names under which the film was released internationally (according to IMDB) include ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’[1], which provides a well-staged climax and Olivier with an impressive death scene.  (He never lost his talent for remarkably physicalised agonies – as the television Brideshead Revisited, forty years later, proves.)   The sequences aboard HMS Victory are followed by Emma’s receipt of Captain Hardy’s bad news.  This scene too is impressive and imaginative.  Hardy (Henry Wilcoxon) keeps delaying telling Emma that Nelson is dead.  She shows no sign of impatience.  Vivien Leigh makes us believe that she prefers Hardy’s anguished prevarication to hearing him say what she knows must have happened.  Even so, a decisive switch to Nelson as the central figure has now taken place and the leading lady can’t quite regain the initiative.  The narrative is bookended by scenes in Calais, where the aging, alcoholic, fallen-on-hard-times Emma tells her story to a street girl (Heather Angel) with whom she shares a prison cell.  In the closing sequence, the cellmate eagerly asks, ‘And then … What happened after?’  Emma replies, ‘There is no then.  There is no after’.  That’s the end of the film and the effect is anti-climactic in not quite the right way.  It’s as if Korda himself has lost interest in his heroine.

    Rudolph Maté’s black-and-white photography and sets designed by the director’s brother Vincent give the picture, especially the opulent residence of Emma’s uncle and husband Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray), the British ambassador to Naples, a glossy, expensive look.  Yet the film, even before its climactic change of tack, doesn’t penetrate the surface of its production in the way this viewer had hoped, seeing it so soon after Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII.  The passion of the Nelson-Emma love affair is constrained by a Hollywood-history stiffness and coarsened by an overwrought Miklós Rózsa score that has to be heard to be believed.

    Even though the historical context of its making now eclipses That Hamilton Woman as drama, some elements of the latter have aged well.  In the opening Calais scene, the blows exchanged by a police officer and Emma are startlingly realistic.  Vivien Leigh, at the height of her post-Gone with the Wind fame, gives a fine performance:  her changes of mood and pace are dazzling.  The women in the cast, although in a small minority, make a strong impression:  Gladys Cooper, as Nelson’s chilly, shrewish but convincingly offended wife; the Irish actress Sara Allgood as Emma’s mother.  The latter wasn’t really Irish but Allgood’s accent and presence help convey a sense of Emma’s humble origins that Leigh’s poise and beauty obscure.  The mother’s xenophobic chatter (which also reflects the world of 1941) in a dinner-table scene is an entertaining highlight.

    The men are relatively boring – even Olivier at times.  He’s deft in the low-key moments with Leigh, a bit dull when he smoulders and particularly when he delivers an admittedly prosy speech, as bells ring in the new century, in which Nelson lists big names and events of the old one.   Henry Wilcoxon is a handsome, likeable Hardy, though he overdoes the grief when Hardy finally spits it out that Nelson’s dead.   As the cuckolded Sir William, Alan Mowbray is even duller than he’s surely meant to be.  The phrase ‘that Hamilton woman’ does occur a couple of times in the film, including in a letter that Nelson’s son Josiah (Ronald Sinclair) writes his mother.

    19 January 2019

    [1] This was the film’s title in Portugal, where it was released at the end of 1941.  In several other countries, it was Lady Hamilton.  In Italy and West Germany, where it didn’t see the light of day until the early post-war years, it was respectively, Il grande ammiraglio (‘The Great Admiral’) and Lord Nelsons letzte Liebe (‘Lord Nelson’s Last Love’).

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