Michelangelo Antonioni's L’avventura (1960)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is one of my most favorite films, exploring the incompatibility of the primal elements of nature with human beings, specifically human beings who think they have civilized the inhospitable by maintaining a rigorously prim lifestyle of corsets, frocks, and immaculate white lace dresses. Mrs. Appleyard’s Victorian-fashioned girls’ school plants their field trip in the muggy, buzzing mosslands of Hanging Rock, certain their propriety and neck-to-ankle-length dresses will ward off the wilderness. For the school’s presumption, three of the girls vanish, to god knows where, seemingly swallowed into the earth.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura’s premise is identical, but serving different purposes: a group of Italian bourgeoisie out yachting find themselves drawn to a poker-faced landmass, an island, whose features are often shot to accentuate their permanence as compared to the dwarfed ephemera of the tourists. Whereas the Rock in Weir’s film evoked a more actively malevolent presence, the rocks and quarries on the anonymous island in Antonioni’s film are indifferent to the visitors, though the indifference is frighteningly implacable, and accompanied by the ever-present sound of the wind, the island begins to give the impression that it is harboring secrets. One of those secrets is the whereabouts of Anna (Lea Massari), ostensibly the lead female character in the film – she is introduced to us before anyone else (the film opens with Anna persuading her father not to worry about the yachting excursion). Anna’s boyfriend or fiancée, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), join her on the trip, as well as some other friends.

Anna comes from a wealthy family, is spoiled, and jaded in a petulant sort of way that renders her dissipated restlessness more unlikable than the others, who, granted, are as listless and idle as she, though without the nasty attitude. These people have nothing to do and nowhere to go: ennui hangs over them all as darkly as the uniform cloud that shudders quietly over the island as they idle on land. Anna, so bored she has begun to play irresponsible tricks on her friends and loved ones by claiming to have come within proximity of a shark, seems to be asking for it, and indeed, It answers, and she abruptly disappears, triggering the alarm of her fellow island-loiterers, who then search for her earnestly and without results. It appears her dissipation was more profound than it appeared.

Whether the disappearance is literal or not can be puzzled over for hours – the whole film presents itself in a protracted state of meditative aimlessness, saying nothing, revealing nothing, doing nothing, really, but at the same time, expressing everything.

Some audiences don’t like to fill in the blanks provided by a film, but what is art if not a communication of sensibilities? How is the art to linger in the crevices of your brain if you’ve solved it, know it top to bottom, understand it thoroughly? Film is a medium that is too often used as vulgar diversion, and not enough as a means of refinement. How is one to hear God without silence and stillness (the two things American audiences find utterly anathema when sitting down to watch a movie)?

One might say, after watching Claudia guiltily succumb to Sandro’s affections only to see him cheating on her with a prostitute late in the film, that the disappearance of Anna earlier was not literal, but symbolic of the manner in which men and women, after growing tired with their current lover, lose sight of them. I think the mystery is part of the fascination of Antonioni’s film, a haunting hypothesis that the more insolent a person is in broadcasting their dissatisfaction, how bored they are by existence, the sooner existence will let them know how bored it is of them.


Grade: A+