L'Avventura

During the past several years, I have used Antonioni's L'Avventura to discount, even disparage, other movies made by that Italian director -- for instance, "sure L'Eclisse is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to L'Avventura."  (I tend toward a similar bias when discussing Fellini -- that is, using the epic scope of La Dolce Vita to diminish some of the director's other films.)  Therefore, it was salutary that I inherited from a deceased friend a nice Blu-ray version of this film, Antonioni's signature movie and the picture that made him famous outside of Italy.  I recall watching the 1960 movie several years ago and being astonished by the film's beauty and profundity.  On this watching, I must confess to being more than a little disappointed.  L'Avventura remains remarkable, but I now find it's last half a little tedious and aimless. 

Everyone will recall the plot.  A beautiful young woman, Claudia (Monica Vitti) goes with some wealthy and sybaritic friends on a yacht cruise among the barren and eerie Aeolian Islands -- a smoking volcano guards the horizon in many of these scenes.  Claudia's friend, Anna, who is disenchanted with her architect lover and fiancee, Sandro, vanishes.  Her friends search the island but there is no trace of her. (At first, we suspect that Anna is punishing Sandro for his callousness by hiding among the volcanic caves and pits on the island -- Sandro takes Anna for granted, no longer satisfies her sexually, and when Anna feigns a shark attack, fails to respond with the necessary gallantry.  Later, we suspect that someone may have murdered Anna -- sinister boats have been hanging around the islet and there's a hermit shepherd as well who seems fully capable of raping Anna and disposing of her corpse in the turbulent seas.)  The other two couples go to Sicily and give up the search for the missing woman.  Claudia continues to search all of the islands and, then, accompanies Sandro along the coast of Sicily where rumors involving sightings of the young woman have been reported.  The yacht contained six people (in addition to Raimundo, the ship's captain) with Claudia as a seventh passenger -- it seems that Anna has brought Claudia along to help fend off the advances of Sandro whom she no longer loves.  With Anna's disappearance, it is simply logical, a kind of fait accompli, that Claudia will accompany Sandro and, very quickly, even nonchalantly, become his lover.  The two persist in the fiction that they are looking for Anna but it's obvious that they are on a journey that is, in fact, a romantic tryst.  Claudia feels guilty about sleeping with Sandro but she's self-assured and finds the older man attractive.  Ultimately, the couple beds down at a luxury hotel, apparently some sort of castle frequented by the rich and famous -- someone suggests that Anna is among the guests at this expensive and elite hotel.  By this time, Claudia is fearful that they will, in fact, encounter the missing woman.  Sandro doesn't return to his room and Claudia, discovering that he has not slept in his bed, dashes through the hotel's corridors at dawn -- she is certain that she will find Sandro and Claudia together.  Instead, she finds Sandro having sex with a courtesan on a couch in the hotel's solarium.  Sandro pays off the prostitute.  Claudia and Sandro wander along the fortifications of the castle and, finally, come together on a battlement overlooking an abandoned church, possibly destroyed during the war -- the rising sun rakes across the hollow shadowy vault of the smashed basilica.  At first, Claudia can't bring herself to touch Sandro, but, then, with a trembling hand, strokes his lustrous black hair -- it's a creepy maternal gesture and, perhaps, indicates what Sandro has been seeking all along. 

The first half of this disheartening story is pretty much beyond reproach.  We see Anna with her land-developer father -- he is a monster, simultaneously developing and ruining the eternal city of Rome:  looming over  the horizon is the basilica of St. Peters, presiding, it seems, over a vast construction site.  The old man warns Anna that her architect boyfriend will never marry her -- something that pleases Anna since she doesn't intend to marry the man herself.  Anna and Claudia go to a deserted piazza where Sandro lives and Anna takes her boyfriend to bed while Claudia, sometimes seen in deep focus, wanders around the empty landscape:  colonnades and shadowy towers like something out of de Chirico.  While making love to Sandro, Anna keeps raising her head like someone coming up to gulp air after being underwater -- then, she looks down at her boyfriend with disdain, even disgust.  Sandro with the two women in the car shows off exactly as you would expect from an Italian male -- he drives too fast and fishtails the convertible.  The scenes at sea and on the island are eerie and feel primordial -- a sea spout grazes disturbed water and the island is riven with deep gorges filled with battering cataracts of wave.  A storm traps Sandro and Claudia in the hermit's grotto-like hut.  Because it is cold Claudia wears Anna's sweater and Sandro looks at her with a mixture of horror and desire.  Claudia uses rainwater impounded in a pitted boulder to wash her face. 

The film's theme is intensely gendered -- as far as Italian men are concerned, women are apparently fungible:  one can be substituted for another.  Sandro simply replaces Anna with Claudia and, when Claudia is too exhausted to satisfy him sexually at the hotel, he takes up with the prostitute.  In effect, Claudia becomes the missing girl -- we get the sense that soon enough she will vanish also.  Sicily is portrayed as impoverished with near 100% unemployment.  Mobs of single men roam the streets harassing the few women that they encounter.  In one bizarre scene, about 5000 men gather around a single woman -- she is thought to be Anna.  In fact, the woman is just some kind of gold-digger looking to become famous in the tabloids -- but we see an entire army of men mobbing her.  The concept seems to be that the southern Italian men will do anything to seduce any available woman, but once they have conquered her, they don't really want anything to do with her.  (This is rendered explicit in a short scene in which a housewife from the North speaks in a friendly way to Claudia, identifying her as from Rome -- the woman has been married for only three months, but her husband already seems to be happy ignoring her and flirting in a predatory way with Claudia.  After she has exchanged a few words with Claudia, her husband peremptorily orders to to "get back inside."  In another scene, Sandro goes into a ramshackle hotel to search for Anna (someone has reported her there) -- in the three minutes that he is absent, a nasty-looking group of about 50 Sicilian thugs gathers around Claudia.  She is bizarrely serene and indifferent but the crowd of men are muttering lascivious remarks and the whole thing threatens to turn very ugly.  Sandro is quick to threaten other men -- at one point, he gratuitously destroys an ink drawing made by another man, apparently an architecture student.  Men are dangerously competitive -- he challenges the student to a fight and one longs to see him gets his faces smashed-in.  (No such luck.)   If the men are nasty, the women are equally unpleasant -- there's a pointless sequence involving one of the women on the boat initiating a love affair with a gawky 17-year old boy.  The kid purports to be an artist but his only subject is naked women.  The film gestures toward the theme that Italian men are intrinsically childish, monsters of self-regard, and pretty much uninterested in the woman that they obsessively seduce and bed.  But this film signals the beginning of Antonioni's own sexual affair with the much younger Monica Vitti -- she looks to be about twenty, while Antonioni was 47 when he made this movie.  So, in some ways, the movie enacts the very sort of relationship that, it seems, to criticize.  In effect, the movie tells us that women are invisible -- once seduced, they can be abandoned either emotionally or literally.  Clearly, Antonioni was deeply in love with Vitti when they made the movie -- he lets the camera linger on her impassive, pale features and blonde hair at length.  And when she wants to mug, he indulges her -- in one scene, she literally makes funny faces at the camera..  The whole thing is grave and mostly very solemn -- in southern Italy (hence the setting in Sicily) men are unique, aggressive, idiosyncratic, by contrast women are totally replaceable, one is as good as another:  in the night, all cats are black.