L’Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni

L’Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni

10 out of 10

Some critics have included this chef d’oeuvre on:

-          The list of the best ten motion pictures ever made

Martin Scorsese has said:

-          “L’Avventura gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the cinema”

Indeed, it feels like this magic film has everything!

All the range of human emotions is present here:

-          Love, anger, hate, passion, boredom, sexual attraction, listlessness, curiosity, envy, lust, depression, forgiveness…

Art is present in the form of:

-          Beautiful, black and white landscapes, architecture- the hero, Sandro,  is an architect, painting

I think the most important personage is Claudia as portrayed by the otherworldly, mesmerizing Monica Vitti:

-          She has  all the qualities of a woman, perhaps a human being in general, just as the film covers almost anything we need in a work of art, except perhaps violence, of the physical kind

-          Claudia represents the angel, passion, confusion, forgiveness, frailty, temptation, the martyr, dragon, Super Woman or Ubermensch

-          She reminds one of Goethe:

-          « Das Ewig- Weibliche Zieht uns hinan »

The plot is not important I would say…

Or maybe not in sense it is in a crime story, where details are of paramount importance.

Sandro is involved with Anna, to begin with.

They meet with Claudia and sail with a group of rich people on a boat, near the islands of the Mediterranean coast of Italy.

After a quarrel, Anna is missing on this small, rather isolated island on which their party is looking for her.

The police are brought in, with helicopter, divers but to no avail, for they find no woman or dead body.

There may be some information on the shore, where they have caught a group of poachers that may know something.

After this, it is off to a village where a pharmacist may have seen the missing woman and help Sandro find her.

The most important aspect in all this is the fact that Sandro and Claudia become involved with each other.

Claudia is torn and refuses to accept that she is falling for the boyfriend of her missing girlfriend that could well be dead.

But the passion, attraction and eventually love may be too strong to resist and after making Sandro get off the train, when the two meet again they start a relationship that appears to be intense and passionate.

Only Sandro may be experiencing a psychological phenomenon called The Honeymoon Effect way too soon.

Marcel Proust talks about this in his masterpiece, in my view the best novel ever written, Remembrance of Things Past, to explain situations wherein once we have the affection of a lover, we are not interested anymore.

When Claudia and Sandro go to the village where the pharmacist is supposed to have seen Anna, they see marriage at its worst.

The woman married for only three months is unhappy in the place and the man is obviously interested in any good looking woman, but less, if at all, in his own wife…

-          The very picture of marital bliss, says Sandro

There are many awesome scenes- Men on the street, bullies, harassment artists of “antan”, and many symbols:         the sea, clergy, the law.

I identified with Sandro, especially when he mentions his profession and the challenges he is facing, which sound like the stepping stones or stumbling blocks I have ahead:

“Sandro: [Admiring the buildings of a small town from a roof top] Such imagination. Such movement. They were concerned with the architectural aesthetics. Such extraordinary freedom. I must go ahead and leave Ettore. I'd like to work on design again. I used to have ideas of my own, you know.

Claudia: Why did you stop?

Sandro: Why, why, why? Because it isn't easy to admit that a red floor suits a room when you are thinking exactly the opposite. But the lady wants it red. Because there is always a lady... or a man... and so... Once I was asked to make the estimate for the construction of a school. It took me a day and a half. I earned four million lira. So I went on giving estimates of other people's projects. Why are you looking at me this way?

Claudia: Because I am convinced you could make really beautiful things.

Sandro: I don't know. I really don't know about that. Who needs beautiful things nowadays, Claudia? How long will they last? All of this was built to last centuries. Today, ten, twenty years at the most, and then? Well...”