The adventure of watching L’avventura

I had never seen the perhaps most famous and first of Michelangelo Antonioni’s early 1960s trilogy of films, L’avventura, until recently (on the Criterion Channel). L’avventura, released in 1960, predated the other films in the series, La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962), and was the breakout movie for the esteemed Italian actress Monica Vitti. All three films deal with human alienation and the existential quest for connection, a rarity – perhaps outside of Ingmar Bergman’s films – at that time. Yet, for me, L’avventura is the most inaccessible of the three films. Clocking in at almost two and a half hours, it’s slow and plodding. Nothing necessarily wrong with that but there seems very little going on in it. A group of friends set sail for an island off Sicily and one, Anna (Lea Massari) disappears. The rest of the movie isn’t so much about trying to find her as it is the evolving romantic relationship between Claudia (Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna’s lover. In fact, so little goes on in the film it was famously booed and mocked during its premier at the Cannes Film Festival, though it did win the Jury Prize. So inaccessible is the movie that I had to turn to a companion documentary by critic Gene Youngblood (also on Criterion) which does a scene by scene narration of the film. That was worth it. Now, I started to understand. Sure, I originally got the fact there were two people having a hard time connecting as they roam in various austere environments but I totally missed the extravagant symbolism throughout. And I’m sure those people booing at Cannes did too! In fact, the film is the celluloid counterpart to looking at a piece of abstract art – say, a Mark Rothko painting. Youngblood, who says he watched the film 11 times (in a row, I believe) and “passionately” loves it, explains how the scenes were framed and the symbolism of everything from natural topography to the characters’ physical expressions, placement to one another, use of body parts and extraneous elements like bell towers and urban squares. The movie, by any standard, did break ground in the way scenes were framed. Folks, it’s stuff you and I (okay I’ll speak for myself) probably never would have guessed – and I like these kinds of movies. So, should you embark on watching L’aventurra, do yourself a favor and watch the Gene Youngblood voice over narration as well. But, truth to tell, even with Youngblood’s analysis I still found myself straining that L’aventurra all adds up to what it’s supposed to be.