Приключение L'Avventura (1960)

1960 film
the Antonioni film

L'Avventura is a 1960 Italian drama film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Developed from a story by Antonioni with co writers Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra, the film is about the disappearance of a young woman (Lea Massari) during a boating trip in the Mediterranean, and the subsequent search for her by her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti). It was filmed on location in Rome, the Aeolian Islands, and Sicily in 1959 under difficult financial and physical conditions. The film is noted for its unusual pacing, which emphasizes visual composition, mood, and character over traditional narrative development. L'Avventura was nominated for numerous awards and was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. The film made Monica Vitti an international star. According to an Antonioni obituary, the film "systematically subverted the filmic codes, practices and structures in currency at its time". L'Avventura is the first film of a trilogy by Antonioni, followed by La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962).#tag:ref|The form of the "trilogy" comes from the parallel between the first two films, particularly in their endings which are countered by L'Eclisse. The first two end at dawn with a renewal of a relationship which had been partly destroyed. fifth in 1972 and seventh in 1982. In 2010, it was ranked #40 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema". The film would go on to influence several arthouse directors, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and Hirokazu Kore eda.

Anna and her friend Claudia meet up at Anna's father's villa before embarking on a yachting trip along the Mediterranean. They head into Rome to meet Anna's boyfriend, Sandro, near Pons Fabricius. While Claudia waits downstairs, Anna and Sandro make love in his house. Sandro then drives the two women to the coast where they join two affluent couples for their voyage. The next day, the group reaches the Aeolian Islands, and Anna jumps into the water for a swim. Sandro follows her when she claims to have seen a shark, only to find out later that it was a lie. During their trip, Anna confides in Sandro about her unhappiness with his frequent business trips, but he dismisses her concerns and takes a nap on the rocks. Later, Corrado becomes concerned about the weather and decides to leave the island. However, Anna goes missing, and Sandro brushes it off as typical behavior. They search the island but find nothing. Sandro, Corrado, and Claudia stay behind to continue the search, while the others notify the authorities. As they search, Sandro takes offense when Claudia suggests his neglect may have played a role in Anna's disappearance. The police conduct a thorough search but find nothing, and Anna's father arrives. Sandro decides to investigate nearby smugglers, but before leaving, he kisses Claudia, startling her. She decides to search other islands alone, and they agree to meet up later in Palermo. Sandro realizes that the smugglers have no information about Anna's disappearance. When Claudia arrives, they meet at the train station, and their attraction is evident, but Claudia urges him to leave. She boards a train to Palermo, and as it departs, Sandro jumps aboard. Claudia is annoyed, but Sandro sees no sense in sacrificing their attraction. Claudia is troubled by how easily things can change. Sandro relents and gets off the train at Castroreale. In Messina, Sandro meets with journalist Zuria, who suggests Anna may have been seen by a chemist in Troina. Sandro bribes Zuria for another story and heads to Troina. Meanwhile, Claudia arrives at Corrado's villa, where no one takes Anna's disappearance seriously. Claudia leaves for Troina after reading Zuria's follow up story. In Troina, Sandro and Claudia track down a chemist who claims to have sold tranquilizers to Anna. They learn that the woman identified by the chemist left for Noto in southern Sicily. Together, they drive south, stopping at a deserted village before making love on a hill overlooking the town. In Noto, they search for Anna at the Trinacria Hotel, but find nothing. Claudia remains conflicted between her feelings for Sandro and her loyalty to Anna. At the Chiesa del Collegio, Sandro reveals his disappointment with his career and proposes to Claudia, but she declines. The next morning, they both seem to be passionately in love, but Claudia resists his advances and suggests they leave. In Taormina, Sandro and Claudia stay at the San Domenico Palace Hotel while Sandro's boss and his wife prepare for a party. Claudia decides to skip it, while Sandro checks out the women and recognizes Gloria Perkins, a beautiful 19 year old "writer" and aspiring actress who is actually an expensive prostitute. Later, Claudia searches for Sandro and finds him embracing Gloria. Heartbroken, Claudia runs off, and Sandro follows her to the hotel terrace. There, they both cry and Claudia enigmatically places her hand on Sandro's head as they look out at Mount Etna in the distance.

Shooting began in August 1959 and lasted until 15 January 1960. Antonioni began filming the island sequence with the scenes immediately after Anna disappears. The majority of shooting on the island was filmed on the island Lisca Bianca (white fish bone) with a cast and crew of 50 people. Other locations for the island sequence included Panarea (which was the production's headquarters), Mondello and Palermo. Filming the island sequence was intended to take three weeks, but ended up lasting for four months. Difficulties included the islands being infested with rats, mosquitoes and reptiles; also, the weather was unexpectedly cold, and the navy ship hired to transport the cast and crew to the island every day never appeared. In order to carry personal items and equipment to the island, the crew had to build small rafts out of empty gas canisters and wooden planks; these were towed by a launching tug every morning. One week after shooting began, the film's production company went bankrupt, leaving the production in short supplies of food and water. Antonioni still had a large supply of film stock and managed to get the cast and crew to work for free until funding for the film was found. At one point, ships stopped making trips to Lisca Bianca, and the cast and crew were stranded for three days without food or blankets. Eventually, the crew went on strike and Antonioni and his assistant director shot the film themselves. After several weeks of Antonioni and the crew working without a budget, the production company Cino del Duca agreed to finance the film and sent money to him.

The film's musical score was composed by Giovanni Fusco, who had scored all of Antonioni's films up to that time. Antonioni usually only used diegetic music in his films and this was one of the latter times that he (briefly) included a musical score for scenes other than during the credits. For L'Avventura, Antonioni asked Fusco to compose "jazz as though it had been written in the Hellenic era". Metro Goldwyn Mayer, American International Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. refused the US distribution rights, so Antonioni sold the project to Columbia Pictures.

L'Avventura grossed 340 million lire in Italy during its initial release in Italy.

Despite the film's eventual lionization by film scholars, the film received a harsh reception at its opening in May at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. It is one of the festival's more notorious reactions. According to Vitti, the screening of Cannes was a real life drama. From the opening titles, despite the film's serious tone, laughs erupted in a dark theater packed with critics and photographers. Laughs continued through the runtime, joined by boos. Gene Youngblood said that audience members usually booed during long sequences where nothing happened to further the film's plot, but has asserted that "quite a lot is happening in these scenes". at the same festival, and went on to international box office success and what has been described as "hysteria". Youngblood described the trilogy of which L'Avventura is the first component as a "unified statement about the malady of the emotional life in contemporary times". Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film a "weird adventure" and praised its cinematography and performances. Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice called it the movie going phenomenon of 1961, and praised Antonioni's depiction of characters that cannot communicate with each other. Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote that "Antonioni is trying to exploit the unique powers of the film as distinct from the theater He attempts to get from film the same utility of the medium itself as a novelist whose point is not story but mood and character and for whom the texture of the prose works as much as what he says in the prose". Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker". Alexander Walker judged it the best film ever made.

Much has been made of Anna's unsolved disappearance, which Roger Ebert has described as being linked to the film's mostly wealthy, bored, and spoiled characters, none of whom have fulfilling relationships. They are all, wrote Ebert, "on the brink of disappearance". According to Alain Robbe Grillet, many shots in the "continental" part of the film are taken from the point of view of an unseen character, as if Anna was following Sandro and Claudia to see what they would do. When asked, Antonioni told Robbe Grillet that the "missing" scene (showing Anna's body recovered from the sea) was scripted and actually filmed but did not make it into the final cut, apparently for timing reasons.