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.
