“Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, simply put, is one of the most influential films ever made. Along with Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless, it helped usher cinema into modernism. It came out in 1960 a few months before Psycho. Like the Hitchcock, a woman opens the film and is established as the apparent lead before disappearing from the narrative altogether early on. The film sets this up as a mystery to be solved, but radically, Antonioni leaves it unanswered; instead, turning his attention to the affair that springs between her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti).
“L'Avventura was startlingly new when it made its debut at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival where the audience reaction was largely one of derision. But critics acclaimed it as an instant classic and in the 1962 Sight & Sound poll, it ranked behind only Citizen Kane among the best films ever made. Its impact has been so immersed in film language though that today, L'Avventura's innovation doesn't stand out so much even as it remains an indubitable achievement in film form.
“Antonioni's subject in L'Avventura is the decadent idle rich. Claudia may be the most sympathetic among them, and while Monica Vitti has great screen presence, none of the characters are particularly likeable. They are self-righteously privileged and morally vacuous. Claudia and Sandro only meet 3 days before Anna (Lea Massari) disappears during a trip to the Aeolian Islands and Sandro makes advances on Claudia almost right after his lover goes missing. Claudia resists at first, but they encounter infidelity everywhere and that resistance is fleeting.
“Instead of narrative or commiserative characters, Antonioni captivates through film form: composition/camera placement, extensive use of deep focus photography playing with foreground and background, imaginative blocking of the characters, and most of all, the usage of space, mostly to indicate the emptiness of these lives despite all the beauty around them. There are so many shots of lone figures dwarfed by their surrounding landscapes. The great scenes or shots come one after another - Claudia waking in the morning to a beautiful sunrise, she and Sandro talking with a stunning cloudscape behind them, Claudia delighted with the communication from other church bells, Sandro casually ruining the art of a young man in an act of wanton cruelty, Claudia pacing her room and making faces in the mirror when she is unable to sleep, and Claudia's run down the vast empty hall of the San Domenico Palace Hotel.
"Easily the best of the trilogy of existential ennui that Antonioni made with La Notte and L'Eclisse, L'Avventura pushed formalism to the foreground while narrative receded to the background. Earlier filmmakers like F.W. Murnau and Josef Von Sternberg with their striking sense of composition, camera movement, and indulgence with space and time presaged Antonioni and soon after L'Avventura, films like Last Year at Marienbad and Antonioni's own Red Desert would take this style much further. L'Avventura though was the lynchpin and its influence can also be seen from Theo Angelopoulos, Bela Tarr, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien to Kelly Reichardt, Jia Zhangke, and Andrei Zvyagintsev today.” ~ George Wu
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