L Avventura

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Film Description

The landmark first film in a loose trilogy which also comprises La Notte and L'Eclisse. A woman goes missing during a Mediterranean boating trip, and as her companions vainly search for her, a couple tentatively fall in love. Ragged of structure, rambling and fresco-like, this vision of an alienated middle-class broke with classical storytelling, suggesting that beginnings, middles and endings don't come in that order in life. The controversial winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1959.

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Review by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith on 3rd June 2008

The film that revealed Antonioni to the world. A group of Roman socialites is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number (Anna, played by Lea Massari) disappears. Murder, accident, suicide?

Nobody knows. Anna’s best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her and, in the course of their journey across Sicily following up clues, fall in love themselves. Claudia feels this is a betrayal of Anna; Sandro seems not to. When Sandro then in turn betrays Claudia with a high-class tart in a hotel, the new relationship is put at risk but seems to survive.

‘Seems’ is indeed the key word in discussing L’Avventura, as well as Antonioni’s subsequent films such as La Notte or L’Eclisse. In these films nothing is ever certain and an air of mystery hangs over the smallest events as much as over the major ones.

Accustomed to the heavily signalled certainties of melodrama, audiences took a little time to adjust to Antonioni’s deliberately quizzical approach to the problems of human relationships and his refusal either to moralise or to dramatise. Indeed, although it won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1960, it was booed by some members of the audience there.

There were other novelties too – the slow rhythms, the sparing use of music, and the sensitivity to nature and landscape shown by both filmmaker and his central character played by Monica Vitti. These novelties took time to absorb, but gradually audiences warmed to them. Most of all though, it was the sense of modernity inherent in the film that took viewers by surprise, the sense that here was a filmmaker who had caught the feel of life as it was being lived – at least by a people of a certain class – at the beginning of the 1960s. Nothing surprising in that, you might say, and something similar was happening in France with the New Wave there. But what is perhaps more surprising is the way this sense of modernity is still there forty or more years later. L’Avventura is a film that doesn’t stale, and that continues to look fresh, as if the modern world and modern cinema had been born along with it.

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Article - "Tragic Muses - Monica Vitti and Anna Karina" by Alan Boshier
Wednesday 2nd April 2003

In the golden era of European art cinema, two actresses came to embody the work of the directors that they were associated with on both a personal and professional level to an extent that it is hard to separate one from the other. They are Monica Vitti and Anna Karin...  View article in full

Article - "23 Must-See Films" by John Davies
Thursday 1st January 2004

23. PIERROT LE FOU (GODARD, 1965)


A delight for intellectuals, hedonists and video store film geeks-turned-director alike, here's the quintessential Godard; less famous than the groundbreaking Breathless, less masterfully controlled than...  View article in full

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Sight and Sound Critics Choice 2002

Including: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Andrei Rublev, Au Hasard Balthazar, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless (Godard, 1959), City Lights, Fanny and Alexander, Fellinis 8 1/2, Intolerance, Ivan The Terrible (Parts 1 & 2).

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This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

Films Jeremy Paxman Won't Like by Alan Boshier

The recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni were marked in fulsomely philistine fashion by BBC's Newsnight programme; in particular Mr. Paxman excelled in his very realistic portrayal of an arch art cinema hater. So, as a service to the esteemed Mr. Paxman, here is a list of films he should steer well clear of; accidental exposure would risk extreme apoplexy and other symptoms of cultural and artistic myopia.

My Favouritest Films Evah! by spicebrain

One hundred cinematic masterworks that are beloved by my wasted little heart. I implore you to check them all out asap. (Also, allow me to pimp http://filmislove.blogspot.com - thanks!)

Time Out Top 100 Movies by claudia

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