Click image to purchase

Alienation Isolation Italy

L'Avventura is the first film in Antonioni's trilogy about alienation. The film won the Special Jury Award at Cannes in 1960 and the Criterion edition begins with a screen that says exactly that. This would definitely look best on a widescreen television; the pan and scan settings on my player cut off a huge chunk of the movie. We get to listen to a very cool Spaghetti Western/Italian rock style soundtrack while the credits roll.

This begins with Anna {Lea Massari} outdoors, walking towards the camera. She rounds the corner of a shrubbery and says goodbye to her father {Renzo Ricci}, who's busy bemoaning the fact that the house will soon be smothered by modern high-rise buildings and the fact that he'll be alone while she's away at sea for the next five days. Dad asks Anna if she doesn't think she should be wearing a sailor's hat and tells her "that guy will never marry her". Claudia {Monica Vitti} and the chauffeur arrive at this point and the three of them pile into the car. After a quiet ride downtown, they argue a bit about relationships.

When Sandro {Gabriele Ferzetti} calls to Anna from the window, she strides purposefully up the stairs to his apartment, stands in his window for a moment and turns with a lusty look in her eye and begins to remove her clothing. When Sandro protests that her friend is waiting downstairs, Anna simply says "she can wait." and walks into the bedroom. Anna's really good at the "lusty look" thing by the way; Sandro hesitates about a second before following her. When Claudia sees Sandro draw the curtains, she decides to wander through a nearby gallery and then into the apartment on the first floor of Sandro's building where they're doing some construction.

Cut to the three friends speeding down a backroad, somewhere in Italy, in Sandro's sports car and from there to the speedboat as it speeds across the water. Claudia sunbathes while Anna and Sandro exchange morning kisses and throw away the newspaper. Corrado and a very cute Guila {Dominique Blanchar} exchange sarcasms and Raimondo complains about his lack of sleep. When the boat arrives at the island of Basiluzzo, they all want to go swimming but decide to go to another island instead. Somewhere between the two, Anna simply jumps into the water and begins her swim. Ever the gentleman, Sandro leaps in after her so as to insure that the woman remains alive. When the cabin cruiser stops, Patrizia {Esmeralda Ruspoli} wanders sleepily up from the depths of the boat and tells us that she dreamt that she was swimming then laments the fate of islands in general.

While everyone's out swimming, Anna screams "shark". While drying off in the cabin a few minutes later Anna and Claudia giggle and Anna admits that there really was no shark. Anna has a slightly twisted sense of humor. Patrizia stays behind and assembles a jigsaw puzzle while the others go ashore. On the shore, Anna and Sandro argue, Corrado and Guila continue to play word games with each other and Claudia plays with the undertow. When Mario comes over from the boat to let everyone know that it's time to leave because the weather's getting a bit rough, Anna is nowhere to be found. For the next many minutes, our whole crew searches for the girl. While they're about this they discover an old house on the island that's occupied by an old man {Jack O'Connell} and wander over many windswept hilltops. Along the way they spend some time discussing Anna, pondering, philosophizing and crying.

It really is a small island so they soon run out of logical places to search. When the police boat shows up they even drag much of the shoreline. Being little more than a pile of rocks, that thrust up from the floor of the sea, the island is riddled with caves and crevices and they can't really be sure they've checked everywhere. Then again, they can't very well search forever. When everyone finally gets back to the mainland, the players still have the figurative "ghost" of Anna to deal with and there's still all of those unanswered questions... that gnawing feeling that you may have missed something obvious, the authorities take on things and there's all of those false leads and rumors to verify. Of course, you do have to go on with life and the second half or so of this film deals with just that. Basically the film follows Claudia and Sandro through a bit of their grieving process and many of the other things they have to go through in order to get beyond Anna's disappearance. The whole thing has a tendency to draw them together as well.

Eventually, this all gets a bit sordid and dark. I have a feeling that it might just appeal to fans of Alfred Hitchcock, though it doesn't move nearly as quickly as most of his films, it's in Italian and it's a little more artsy than most of his films. L'Avventura is slow and quiet and will not please the action movie fan one whit. Most of this is done with dialogue and visuals and some low-key drama. The movie features some really beautiful camera work and some excellent performances as well as a nicely eerie soundtrack that you don't get to hear nearly enough of. It is one of the few black and white films that I can think of that might have benefitted from the use of color, though the scenes shot around the islands do have a sort of bleakness to them that's nicely appropriate. I'd love to have seen this treated similarly to Lina Wertmüller's "Swept Away {1974 not the remake}".