L'avventura
Tags: mystery

Plot synopsis:
Anna (Lea Massari) meets her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) at her father's villa on the outskirts of Rome prior to leaving on a yachting cruise on the Mediterranean. They drive into Rome to Isola Tiberina near the Pons Fabricius to meet up with Anna's boyfriend, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti). While Claudia waits downstairs, Anna and Sandro make love in his house. Afterwards Sandro drives the two women to the coast where they join two wealthy couples and set sail south along the coast.
The next morning the yacht reaches the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily. After they pass Basiluzzo, Anna impulsively jumps into the water for a swim, and Sandro jumps in after her. When Anna yells that she's seen a shark, Sandro comes to her side protectively. Later onboard Anna confesses to Claudia that the "whole shark thing was a lie," apparently to get Sandro's attention. After noticing Claudia admiring her blouse, she slips it into Claudia's bag as a gift. At one of the smaller islands, Lisca Bianca, the party comes ashore. Anna and Sandro go off alone and talk about their relationship. Anna is unhappy with his long business trips. Sandro dismisses her complaints and takes a nap on the rocks.
Sometime later Corrado (James Addams) decides to leave the small island, concerned about the weather and rough seas. They hear a boat nearby. Claudia searches for Anna, but she is gone without a trace. Sandro is annoyed, saying this type of behavior is typical. They explore the island and find nothing. Sandro and Corrado decide to continue their search on the island while sending the others off to notify the authorities. Claudia decides to stay as well. Sandro, Corrado, and Claudia continue their search and end up at a shack where they stay the night. As they talk, Sandro takes offense at Claudia's suggestion that Anna's disappearance is somehow due to his neglect.
In the morning Claudia wakes up before the others and watches the sunrise. After finding Anna's blouse in her bag, she meets Sandro out near the cliffs and they talk about Anna, but Sandro now seems attracted to Claudia. The police arrive and conduct a thorough search, but find nothing. Anna's father, a former diplomat, also arrives in a high-speed hydrofoil. When he sees the books his daughter has been reading—Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Holy Bible—he feels confident that she hasn't committed suicide. The police announce that smugglers were arrested nearby and are being held in Milazzo. Sandro decides to investigate, but before leaving he finds Claudia alone on the yacht and kisses her. Claudia rushes off, startled by his actions. She decides to search the other islands on her own. They all agree to meet up at Corrado's Villa Montaldo in Palermo.
At the Milazzo police station Sandro realizes the smugglers know nothing about Anna's disappearance. When he discovers that Claudia has arrived from the islands, he meets her at the train station where their mutual attraction is evident, but Claudia urges him not to complicate matters and begs him to leave. She boards a train to Palermo, and as the train pulls away, Sandro runs after it and jumps aboard. On the train Claudia is annoyed, saying, "I don't want you with me." She says it would be easier if they sacrifice now and deny their attraction, but Sandro sees no sense in sacrificing anything. Still focused on her friend's disappearance, Claudia is troubled by the thought that it "takes so little to change." Sandro relents and gets off the train at Castroreale.
At Messina Sandro tracks down the journalist, Zuria, who wrote an article about Anna's disappearance. Their meeting is interrupted by crowds of excited men following a beautiful nineteen-year-old "writer" and aspiring actress named Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo) who is actually an expensive prostitute. Sandro stops to admire her beauty. Zuria says he heard stories that Anna was spotted by a chemist in Troina. After bribing Zuria to run another story on Anna, Sandro heads to Troina. Meanwhile, Claudia meets up with her boating companions at Corrado's Villa Montaldo in Palermo. No one seems to take Anna's disappearance seriously except Claudia. Even Corrado's young wife Giulia openly flirts with the young prince in front of her husband. After reading Zuria's follow-up story, Claudia leaves the villa for Troina to continue her search.
In Troina Sandro questions the chemist who claimed to have sold tranquilizers to Anna. Claudia arrives and they learn that the woman identified by the chemist left on a bus to Noto in southern Sicily. Sandro and Claudia resume their search together and drive south. Outside Noto they stop at a deserted village, and then find a hill overlooking the town where they make love while a train goes by. Later in town they go to the Trinacria Hotel where they believe Anna is staying. Claudia asks Sandro to go in alone. While Claudia waits outside, a crowd of men gather around her. When she thinks she sees Sandro and Anna coming down the stairs she runs into a paint store, but Sandro follows and confirms that Anna is not there. Claudia remains torn between her feelings for Sandro and her friendship with Anna.
At the Chiesa del Collegio, a nun shows them the view from the roof. Sandro talks about his disappointments with his work, far removed from his youthful ambitions as an architect. Suddenly he asks Claudia to marry him, but she says no—things are too complicated. She accidentally tugs on a rope that rings the church bells, which are answered by connected church bells at another church. Claudia is delighted by the sounds. The next morning she wakes up in a joyful mood, dancing and singing in the room while Sandro looks on amused. They both seem passionately in love. Sandro goes for a walk to the Piazza Municipio, where he notices an ink sketch left by one of the students. With his keychain he "accidentally" knocks over the ink onto the sketch. The student notices and confronts Sandro, who denies he did it on purpose. Sandro returns to the hotel and tries to make love to Claudia, but she resists, telling him they should leave.
At Taormina they check into the San Domenico Palace Hotel where Sandro's employer Ettore and his wife Patrizia are preparing for a party. Claudia decides not to attend because she's tired. At the party Sandro checks out the women—recognizing the beautiful aspiring actress Gloria Perkins. Back in the room Claudia is unable to sleep. Noticing that Sandro has not yet returned, she goes downstairs to Patrizia's room to inquire about Sandro. Claudia confesses that she's afraid Anna has returned and that Sandro will return to her. After searching the hotel, Claudia finally discovers Sandro having sex with Gloria Perkins on a couch. Claudia runs off, and Sandro follows her onto the hotel terrace where he finds her quietly weeping. Sandro sits down on a bench and says nothing; he too begins to cry. Claudia approaches him, and after hesitating, she places her hand on his head in a gesture of compassion and comfort while looking out at the snow-covered image of Mount Etna on the horizon.

Review: Later on(and I've read this in other people's comments here as well) I found images and dialogue from the movie creeping into my subconscious; entire dreams would take place upon the island where Anna goes missing(often in monochrome), or I'd start to compare real life events to those that occur during the film.
Check out the scene about an hour and ten minutes in, where Sandro and the old man are talking in the middle of an extremely busy street; nothing blurs or goes out of focus, even when a tram comes in and out of the shot, nothing loses it's perspective, and as the scene ends and they walk deep into the shot we can see way past them and far, far into the distance.This seems to be why the film has such a deep affect on the subconscious.
In the scenes on the island where Anna disappears, we see the main characters always in shot, yet in the background there is a feeling that something strange within nature itself is going on.
The darkening of the clouds, the sudden mist upon the water, the rocks falling to the sea, even the sudden appearance of the old hermit character, all give a certain unease.There's also the haunting feeling of the film, as Anna's friends begin, almost immediately to forget about her.
But whereas Bergman's film has moments of true warmth and happiness, Antonioni's L'Avventura is as brutally cold as a Scandinavian winter.Plot summary is not entirely important (and would spoil potential surprises), suffice to say that the movie is uniquely structured and may not proceed the way you expect it to.
Alienation and the inability for humans to connect to one another have never been so painfully presented in film.While discussing the guilt felt in betraying a mutual friend a woman asks "How can it be that it takes so little to change, to forget?" to which the man responds, "It takes even less." Before one of the films many desperate scenes of impersonal copulation the woman cries out in a fit of existential despair, "I feel as though I don't know you!" to which the man responds, "Aren't you happy?
These formal instruments are: slow rhythm, real-time events, long takes, visual metaphors like inhabited island(s), fog, extreme long shots (small characters in panorama) and putting protagonists on inhabited streets or large buildings and landscapes.Great cinematography.
Still, tonight was the first time in three years that I have actually sat down to watch L'Avventura (and I actually plan to re-rent Blowup in the next couple of days and any other Antonioni films I might be able to find).As I have said, L'Avventura has been built up by my mind ever since I saw it.
Romance in his later films was already stale or not allowed to blossom (it appears again in Zabriskie Point, under a different context), but here feelings are pursued, in an effort to reflect if love can be our saving grace.That appearance, born in a barren rock in the middle of the sea, rests on a twofold interpretation.On one level, perhaps in understanding by Anna's inexplicable disappearance the precarious balance in which hangs our fleeting existence, the randomly cruel laws that govern it, the two partners turn to each other for solace.
And perhaps more, seeing deep down in their own selves how quick life can be forgotten, how everything we hold to matter ultimately matters little and how this speck of life we value is merely transient and will come to pass, they turn to each other to desperately defy it, to prove to each other and the world that love cannot simply vanish.Antonioni frames first this realization of transience against the elements of nature, the imperishable, secondly he frames, traps, blocks within the desperate relationship, mostly faces in silhouette, against old medieval buildings, man's folly to mimic the imperishable.
Monica Vitti's character later experiences the same oppressiveness of the "male gaze", yet doesn't feel threatened by it, until her man emerges from a building, at which point she runs and hides.The finale in this sense is a poignant enigma like few in cinema, the smile of a Mona Lisa.
"L'avventura"--"The Adventure", an adventure into the void of the modern world.Antonioni's first international success is a subtle masterpiece focusing on the disappearance of an unhappy woman on an island and her friends' subsequent search.
Indeed, the Anna character comes across as spoiled, irritable, something of a prima donna; Claudia only slightly less so.The film's plot is slow, with long camera "takes".
The circular story, the emphasis on isolation and futility, and the symbolic use of Sicilian landscape returned with greater strength in "L'Avventura," the first film in a free trilogy ("La Notte" and "L'Eclisse" followed) about restless, disillusioned unhappy women and sensitive, unreliable, soft men...Some way into the movie and without a careful explanation, a central affluent character disappears without a trace from a yachting trip...
Few of the group of socialiteswealthy, elegant, boredcome in sight bothered by what has occurred, and while the girl's neglectful sweetheart and her best friend (Monica Vitti) pair off in a search around a remote, uninhabited island, they embark on a spontaneous exciting intimacy The story is simple, but the greatness of the film, however, is in two parts...
I just saw a screening of it again at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago as part of its summer retrospective of Antonioni, and had a different enough experience from the first time that I felt a second posting was needed.I almost feel guilty at my reaction to films like "L'Avventura," and I'm hoping that others who have studied film will understand.
For me, "L'Avventura" carries an effect similar to a Bergman film: a lot of profound, moving imagery (brilliantly photographed), characters that seem to exist in an alternate universe (where emotions dictate every move), and a balance between pretension and 'art' that delivers on the latter about 75% of the time.
The film is a character-driven piece, as Sandro (Gabrielle Ferzetti--"The Night Porter") seeks out his girlfriend, Anna (Lea Massari), who disappears without a trace on an uncharted isle; in her absence, he becomes smitten with Claudia (Monica Vitti), Anna's best friend.
He tells a story of a group of high-society types, the kind that seem all the more empty as they are examined character wise, who on a boat trip stop on an island to walk around, when a woman, Anna (Lea Massari), goes missing.
They search for her, send out more people to search for her, but as the film progresses it can be seen that the search for her is futile, and it becomes an existentialist examination of the character played by Ferzetti and Vitti.The major flaw that I can see with L'Avventura is that it's at times a bit too assured with it's own storytelling skills, and occasionally it plods along.
And so they suffer from self-imposed loneliness, from an inability to connect with other people except on the most superficial level (they stage shark attacks and bouts of sex for quick thrills), and from, not frustration so much as anhedonia, an inability to take pleasure, and also, more shockingly, an inability even to have dreams or desires.While Antonioni's "wealthy characters" now work as apt stand-ins for post-modern man, for every man and woman in the developed world, Antonioni's English-language films tend to focus on photographers and radicals.
The producers urged Antonioni to solve the Anna mystery.He never agreed and he was certainly right.It gives his work an aura of mystery ,something which we would find later in "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (both the novel and Peter Weir's movie).The first part introduces the three main characters:Sandro,Claudia and Anna .Anna is a spoiled child who spends her time going on a cruise with a golden youth.It' s important to notice that her friend Claudia does not seem to come from such a wealthy family.Some critics also noticed that the relationship Anna/Claudia in their cabin was somewhat ambiguous.The scenes on the tiny desert island are among the best in the Italian cinema.It was the right place for a mysterious disappearance: crime?
It's all within the realms of possibility.The second part is Sandro's and Claudia's investigation.Several Antonioni movies take the form of an investigation :from "cronaca di un amore" to "Blow-up" to " Professione :reporter".But little by little,the boy and the girl finally forget Anna and begin a difficult love affair.Excellent use of a baroque palace,which,while being real ,foreshadows Alain Resnais's "Marienbad"..
Along the next days, Sandro and Claudia search Anna in the most different places in Italy and develop an attraction for each other, becoming lovers."L' Avventura"initially impresses with the magnificent cinematography and the beauty of Monica Vitti.
To understand that what is on the screen is not a symbol, but exactly what the thing is, is what was new for this time, and too literal for some, that even the sets and nature are used to express action and character.This film is comparable to walking through an art gallery show.
Finding that these days movies like this "L'AVVENTURA" no longer have space in the movie market is as bleak as the landscapes and souls of the characters of most of Antonioni's films.
Shots are brilliantly captured and for it to linger the way it did, even for a B&W film, I would have enjoyed it if the movie went on for six hours, the sort that I would leave on to play on a TV screen, to be left playing in the background like those aquarium channels on cable, catching a glimpse of it once in a while when my eyes linger away from whatever I'm preoccupied with at any given moment.
There are aspects of these two films which are similar , the deliberate pacing , the 'unknown' , the disaffected characters, but where BLOW UP is great to look at, well acted and very much of-it's-time, L'AVVENTURA is lame, flat, staid and lacking in sufficient plot to last more than an hour.
Antonioni's `L'Avventura' is a boring film, with a soap opera plot; that is if the viewer wants to see it that way.To me, `L'Avventura' is a masterpiece depiction of human nature as the disappearance of a woman shows its effects on the upper-class.
Lea Massari gives, by far, the best performance; making it sad that the film centers around her character's disappearance.Beautiful cinematography creates scenes not soon forgot.
While searching for a woman who has gone missing on a deserted island, the woman's best friend and fiancée slowly fall in love, to the point where they virtually forget her existence Anna (Lea Massari), the girl who disappears, isn't a very likable sort.
There's Raimundo and his wife, who are probably the most grounded of the group; Corrado, who constantly snipes at his wife Giulia 's literalism (he's got a point); Anna and Sandro, both of whom seem to have drifted into an engagement that one is unsure of and the other indifferent to, and Claudia (the gorgeous Monica Vitti) who is the only faintly sympathetic character amongst them.The film is made up of two halves, and things go pretty much as you'd expect following Anna's disappearance.
For this reason I sometimes wonder whether some of these classic films are given 10/10 simply because they have been universally hailed as classics and appear near the top of all the critics' all-time greatest movies lists.The film looks great: interesting locations, handsome and beautiful actors, and truly outstanding cinematography.
This genre raised mainly by italian filmakers who implied a fully dematerialisation of human being by neorealism without any plausible reasons leave an empty gap of endless missunderstood, nothing make sense at all, despite a very auspicious opening all things lose oneself in a dead end labyrinth, to strangle the picture in a merry go round, nothing fit together, as study process of this odd genre works, to try to understand such feelings that amazed so many criticisms around the world but there's a lack of materialism, still it will bother too many cinephiles!!Resume:First watch: 2018 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.
But during the search, her lover and her best friend become attracted to each other." This is way too simple, and I think the most interesting thing is that the film is controlled by the absence of the missing person rather than when she was physically in the picture, not to mention the subtle twists and turns.
During a brilliant, almost wordless segment (a device later perfected in L'eclisse), the party wanders around the island with only the ominous sound of thunder and waves (actually, consider the use of waves and the sparse soundscape throughout the movie).The search goes on, but so does life, with painful clarity, as Sandro and Claudia hesitantly yet inevitably become lovers.
There is something missing in each of their lives, whether they really realize this or not and try to search for that something that it is they miss in their lives and try to really hold on to it, once they have found it.As you could basically always expect from an European movie, it's visually a great looking one, with some great Mediterranean settings and nice black & white camera-work.Just give it another shot if you didn't like it at first, since there simply is no way that anyone could ever call "L'avventura" a bad movie, unless that person doesn't understand its special approach of storytelling and film-making by Michelangelo Antonioni, or just simply wasn't in the right mood for it, the first time around.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/.
But during the search, her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti) become attracted to each other."L'Avventura" influenced the visual language of cinema, changing how subsequent films looked, and has been named by some critics as one of the best ever made.
Although it's open to any number of interpretations, I thought Anna's disappearance was no mystery -the girl was so disaffected and emotionally isolated she just vanished into thin air, into nothingness; what happened to her ultimately doesn't matter very much and her fate is a metaphor for everyone else's.In Antonioni's universe, humans are innately dysfunctional and their attempts to connect on an emotional level are generally unsatisfying experiences; men, apparently, can't help it (threatening crowds of them surrounding unaccompanied women) but "I love you", "you're mine", and "marry me" are spoken much too quickly and without comprehension by either sex.
Three wealthy socialites, Anna (Lea Massari), her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and their beautiful friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), take a boat trip to Lisca Bianca, a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily.
The pace allows time for the central mystery of Anna's disappearance to slowly leave our mind, as Sandro and Claudia's love affair comes to the fore.
Having the fear of Anna potentially re-appearing as sudden as her disappearance, repeatedly cast doubts into her new found relationship with Sandro.Sandro continues the unflattering look at the weakness of male characters in Antonioni films.
Actually the film is about many things, which won't be revealed here.Michelangelo Antonioni is a Zen-like director in that he depicts life as it is with all its contradictions, simple yet complex, soothing and disturbing, an adventure and a bore, beautiful but lonely.
While notable for it's naturalistic milieu depictions, the brilliant use of sound, production design by production designer and art director Piero Poletto and black-and-white cinematography by Italian cinematographer Aldo Scavardo, this plot-driven and dialog-driven psychological drama which examines themes like interpersonal relations, interpersonal communication, alienation and love, depicts several sparse studies of character and contains a fine score by Italian 20th century composer Giovanni Fusco (1906-1968).This mysterious, atmospheric, somewhat romantic and contemplative study of human desolation where time and space plays as significant parts as the characters, the distance between them and how they adapt to their environment, is impelled by the fine acting performances by Italian actor Gabriele Ferzzeti, Italian actress Monica Vitti, Italian actress Lea Massari and French actress Dominique Blanchar.
L'Avventura is a challenging movie: Antonioni's lugubrious pacing, his open disdain for the story he is narrating and its characters can be off-putting, as he plays with the medium in the first episode of his so-called "Incommunicability Trilogy".Nominally, L'Avventura is about the (ultimately never explained) disappearance of a young woman, Anna (Lea Massari), during a visit to a semi-deserted island, and the attempts by her fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to find her.
Once they make it back to the city, however, he soon forgets about her and falls in love with Claudia, one of her friends.I think the film's purpose is to have you ask the question: Why would Anna run away?
Then, you have the final scene where the two characters, presumably, realize why Anna left as they cry together on a bench.I've seen quite a few people bring up this interpretation, but I feel like there are a few other details which are also important to the film.
L'Avventura is a film that attempts much, but, after its interesting first third, it totally unravels with bad characterization, and narrative anomy, which is the fault of its three screenwriters, Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, and Tonino Guerra.It follows a group of rich hedonists who are frolicking in the Mediterranean, off of Sicily, in the Aeolian Sea. The three main characters are Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), a playboy architect, his frigid and scheming fiancée Anna (Lea Massari), and Anna's best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), the archetypal gorgeous brunet and gorgeous blond.
There is less mystery than meets the eye as Massari simply hops on a boat while everyone languishes on a rocky, volcanic island...Apparently...As the film goes on, characters (and viewers) doubt that scenario.Michelangelo Antonioni existential "Avventura" wants to leave you adrift.
The film tells the story of Anna(Lea Massari)a young woman who can no longer endure her meaningless bourgeoisie life and simply fades away without trace, then a discouraged search starts to find her but it only leads to nothing, except an doomed relationship between Anna's best friend Claudia(Monica Vitti)and Sandro(Gabriele Ferzetti) her fiancé.