The director Michelangelo Antonioni, born in 1912, died at the age of ninety-four, in 2007. Though his films of the nineteen-fifties (such as “Le Amiche,” playing at Film Forum next Monday) are all noteworthy, if he had died before making “L’Avventura” at the age of forty-seven, his name would only have been an enticing footnote in movie history. For that matter, if the new 35-mm. restoration of “L’Avventura,” which starts a two-week run at Film Forum tomorrow, were to break off halfway through its hundred-and-forty-three-minute span, viewers might well wonder why it’s rightly considered to be a cinematic landmark—and why there was an even bigger fuss about it when it premièred, in 1960.
It’s nearly an hour before it even becomes clear what the drama is, and still longer before it reveals its radical, even revolutionary, aspects. The Roman heiress Anna (Lea Massari), the daughter of a wealthy diplomat, takes a pleasure cruise on a yacht with her boyfriend, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), a dissolute playboy of vague enterprise, her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), and a handful of others to the volcanic outcropping of the forbidding, sparsely inhabited Aeolian islands, off the coast of Sicily. Anna and Sandro start off as an uneasy couple, seemingly happy in bed and nowhere else, and when the company disembarks on the desolate rock formation of Lisca Bianca, the two of them have a quiet, bitter spat, and soon after he turns his back on her she vanishes—and the romantic melodrama becomes a sort of detective story, as the group scours the craggy islet for her and summons the authorities.
Then it happens: Claudia goes to the boat’s cabin to freshen up, brush her hair, and as she emerges, Sandro arrives and grabs her in a kiss, which she ardently reciprocates. That’s where the real drama begins. The rest of the movie (and it runs almost another hour and a half) is a love story that overlaps with the ongoing search, on the Sicilian mainland, for Anna—even as Claudia admits that she’s now unhappily ambivalent about finding her. What’s unusual about the twist is something other than the mere fact of it—namely, the brute fact of it. Antonioni suppresses any question of motive, any backstory, any glimmer of insight into their affair. In effect, Antonioni takes the format of theatrical naturalism—the depiction of characters’ deeds and speech that reveals their inward, psychological grasp of the exterior net of drama—and blanks it out, setting up the drama, and their activity within it, as a sort of absolute metaphysical condition, and then reducing their interior lives to opaque reflections of it.
Soon thereafter, the movie latches onto its big theme, which Antonioni had been working out from the time of his first feature, “Story of a Love Affair,” from 1950: the formation and deformation of the modern mind through a media-infused industrial aesthetic. Getting hold of a local newspaper with a report on Anna’s disappearance, Sandro goes to a nearby town to meet the journalist, who is in the middle of a roaring crowd of men who are there to see a strange celebrity: Gloria Perkins, a nineteen-year-old writer in provocative attire with an alluring demeanor, who claims to channel the spirits of Tolstoy and Shakespeare. For Antonioni, the real subject is the rather pathetic, rumpled, and corrupt journalist who serves as an echo chamber for this paltry phenomenon—just as he does for Anna’s vanishing.
It’s the journalist’s contact that propels Claudia and Sandro on the next leg of their search—and that contact makes the movie burst into a second cinematic life a full hour and a half into the action, gives Antonioni a moment in which he discovers a new style that orients the rest of the movie, and, for that matter, the rest of his career. He didn’t shoot the movie strictly in sequence (though he wanted to do so), so it’s not clear whether this discovery coincides with the film’s chronology, but he did film the island scenes first (and arduously), and it’s as if the formula that he discovered in the wild found its definitive application upon his return to urban life.
As Sandro leaves the unhappy household of a young pharmacist who told the journalist that he may have seen Anna in his shop, Claudia turns up in a mutual friend’s chauffeured sedan. Sandro pulls her baggage from the car, then brings it to his own convertible; in that shot—with Sandro leaving the frame in the foreground, the sedan rolling off in the distance, and Claudia taking his place in closeup—Antonioni definitively links his theme of shifting and dubious identity to a distinctive pictorial tone. It’s a kind of atonality in images, in which action is detached from cause, repetitions have an uncanny chill, and proportions are thrown out of whack and rendered disjunctive, oppressive, absurd.
Antonioni captured a new bourgeois society that shifted from physical to intellectual creation, from matter to abstraction, from things to images, and the crisis of personal identity and self-recognition that resulted. Vitti was the perfect embodiment of his coldly luminous vision of profundity without depth, of intellect blocked from emotion. Under his direction (and in his field of personal influence—they were lovers at the time), she took on the turbulent passions of the world around her while expressing them minimally, only occasionally bursting out in exuberant rounds of playacting that seem mainly for her characters’ own benefit, shows of artificial emotion meant to prove to herself an emotionalism that she doesn’t actually feel. In the next three films that they made together in the sixties (she played leading roles in “The Eclipse” and “Red Desert” and crucial supporting role in “La Notte”), Antonioni pushed his new style to an extraordinary aesthetic and philosophical extreme. Their collaboration is a crucial moment in the creation of cinematic modernism.
