L’ Avventura starts with Anna, a young and wealthy socialite, walking towards the camera at a leisurely pace. The camera tracks back as she exits her house, carefully following her movement. She stops to converse with her father, but ignores his advice and strides away with her friend Claudia to spend a weekend with her in a yacht.
The characters in the film just seem to drift along through their lives. They walk around aimlessly, rarely, if ever, achieving what they set out to do. In fact,the rest of the plot centers on just that: a purposeless, never-ending journey.
Anna, who is joined in the yacht trip by Sandro, her fiancé, strolls out of sight of the camera and her friends and is never seen again. She disappears on a barren wasteland of an island that was their destination. Claudia and Sandro spend most of the film looking for her. On their journey, they embark on a romantic relationship. Plot-wise, there is nothing more to L’Avventura.
But L’Avventura is not significant because of what happens to its characters on the surface (although abandoning the main character after a quarter of the film is remarkable); it is significant because of the tensions they feel within themselves and the way director Michelangelo Antonioni is able to visualize these feelings.
Take, for example, Claudia and the way Antonioni uses her surroundings to dwarf her.The island with its sharp, jagged stones and high cliffs is one of the loneliest locales ever presented in a film. Surrounded by water, there is nothing in sight but the characters and their thoughts. The isolation inspired by the empty lifestyle of these wealthy friends is a key theme of the movie. Claudia is always tiny, always to the side of the frame or with her back to a wall.
These characters are so empty their biggest fear is that they will simply vanish without a trace.
A recurring visual of the film is one of Claudia and Sandro turning away from every priests and nun they happen to walk by. They turn their backs to tradition, marriage, and religion. Antonioni doesn’t condemn his characters for their modern lifestyles, he simply observes, noting their unhappiness.
On their journey, they encounter a lot of empty churches and towns. They also attend several extravagant parties, always full of people, but the facade of the atmosphere is transparent. All of the sensory pleasures in the world fail to provide them happiness.These people seem unable of enjoying their luxuries.
The characters sometimes express their existential anxieties, but for the most part they keep quiet and leave it to Antonioni to reveal their thoughts through his perfectly composed images and sparse use of music. In one lonely shot, Claudia lays down exhausted on top of her luggage almost as if she didn’t have the energy to keep living the way she has been. The ghost of Anna seems to haunt Claudia, reminding her that the life she lives with Sandro should not be hers. Anna’s body is never found. As far as Claudia is concerned, her best friend could turn up any second, so she lives her life in agony.
“L’Avventura, over two hours of nothing!” That will be the initial conclusion of many. I had to watch it twice just to begin to understand it. I’m not sure if I fully comprehend it. All I know is that I want to watch it a third time. I think it has something to do with the final shot. Two and a half hours of nothing? maybe. But then, there’s this shot.
