L'Avventura: A Missing Person Who Is Never Found
L'Avventura (1960)
Booed off the screen at Cannes, then defended by a petition of critics within days.
Runtime
145 minutes
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Country
France
Cinematography
Aldo Scavarda
The Search That Stops Mattering
A yachting party stops at a volcanic island in the Aeolian chain and a woman disappears. The film spends its first hour on the search, exactly as a thriller would, and then quietly transfers its attention to her best friend and her lover, who fall into each other while the search is still nominally underway. Anna is never found. No explanation is offered, and that refusal is the film's argument: these people cannot sustain an emotion, not even grief, for longer than a few days. Antonioni shoots them against rock, sea, empty piazzas and unfinished buildings, framing figures small and off centre so that architecture keeps winning. Monica Vitti's face does most of the work the dialogue refuses to do.
"Everything is becoming so terribly simple.
"Claudia · L'Avventura · 1960
Watching L'Avventura
Wonder
/
Reel
The Cannes premiere was jeered so loudly that the cast left the auditorium. Within two days thirty five critics and directors signed a statement calling it the most important film in the festival.
Antonioni's framing puts people at the edges of wide compositions dominated by stone and sea, a method he refined further in La Notte and L'Eclisse to form a loose trilogy on the same subject.
This is the film that made unresolved endings respectable in European cinema, and the reason a generation of directors felt free to drop the plot mechanism entirely. Its descendants are everywhere: Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Vanishing, Certified Copy, and every film that opens a mystery in order to talk about something else. Antonioni was not withholding the answer to be clever. He did not think the answer was the interesting part.