IDK abt L’AVVENTURA (1960)

At least everyone’s hair looks great.

L’Avventura actually appeared much earlier on my list, and I’m ashamed to say I skipped it (not that I made, like, a blood oath, but I do like/try to watch these in order)—I think because I’d just worked on something similarly “heavy” (???), and I thought you and I both could use a break. I’m sure I meant to go back, but it never seemed like the right night for a two and half hour Italian film—so when I saw it was playing at Metrograph (what’s more, in the good theater, with the balcony), I jumped at the ticket (or I jumped at the ticket, missed the showing, then jumped at the next one). For context, I’ve never been a huge Antonioni guy: I think I watched, like, Blow-Up and The Passenger in high school, but I remember having trouble connecting to both films’ (frigid) male gaze. But maybe I just started in the wrong place, because L’Avventura’s hero isn’t an oversexed photographer or journalist, but Monica Vitti, whom I do have a connection with—though lol, not as Antonioni’s muse, but as international superspy Modesty Blaise, who, in her self-titled film, essentially does the frug in an A-line dress while hundred dollar bills shoot into the room from every direction. Vitti’s Claudia isn’t L’Avventura’s protagonist from the start, though: much like Psycho (which came out the same year), the film’s first half hour follows her closest friend, Anna, a languorous Italian heiress who’s dating Gabriele Ferzetti’s Sandro—though ambivalently, as seems to be her relationship with life in general. There’s a rage to Anna’s lethargy, an indifference to her tempers, and when she vanishes off the face of a remote volcanic island in the Mediterranean, it’s seemingly into thin air, as if raptured. Her friends (a yachtful of what I can only describe as “Zardozian apathetics”) poke about the island, but it’s no more than a rockface protruding from the sea. They call her name and shrug at one another, but with no real urgency, as if it’s all a lark, a joke, a dream. Indeed, only the arrival of the island’s grizzled caretaker seems to shake some reality into them, who suggests that perhaps Anna has slipped, fallen, drowned, her body pulled into the undertow. Claudia and Sandro remain on the island overnight, in an old shack at the summit, while outside, the wind roars over the bare black bluffs like it’s the face of the moon, or better yet, the primordial rock that life first slithered onto—and though they hope Anna might reappear in the night, it makes cold sense that anyone might be sucked up into the vacuum. The police arrive, and the friends return to their lives, but Sandro and Claudia continue the search: they drift through the Italian countryside in search of clues, but after just a few days, Anna has already faded to a ghost, a phantom, an existential question mark. Sandro turns his gaze on Claudia, who at first resists—but the more he insists, the more the edges of their lives seem to dissolve, and questions of loyalty and good taste begin to feel irrelevant. By the time they return to civilization, the transformation is complete, and Claudia bitterly admits she now fears Anna will reappear, just as suddenly and inexplicably as she vanished. Spoiler (that is, if it’s possible to spoil an Italian POST-neorealist film): she doesn’t. But by the end of the movie, the question of what, exactly, happened to Anna no longer feels important. Wearing a modest white nightgown, Claudia tells Sandro she loves him, then finds him, in the twilight hours, on top of another woman. She rushes into the morning, and Sandro chases her to the edge of the hotel terrace, where she stands gazing out into the city. His face sinks into his hands, and he weeps. It's a moment of helplessness, of resignation, of two satellites, trapped in their own relentless orbits, hurtling through the void. Claudia hesitates, then places her hand on his head.

NEXT TIME!