Review of L'Avventura (1960) by Kyle D — 12 Apr 2011

Michelangelo Antonioni's masterfully directed, L'Avventura is a film that defies any standard genre. We follow the Italian bourgeois to an island, where we watch them as they suffer boredom sunbathing on a yacht and swimming in the Mediterranean. Then one of the girls goes missing. But, interestingly enough, no one seems to care. A haunting look into existential, post-WWII Europe, L'Avventtura-in its unattested visual style-explicates the consequences of living in a world without a moral compass and the impending isolation that one needs to fight in order to escape.

Because L'Avventura relies on visuals to exposit rather than a dialogue driven narrative, it is to be expected that critics do not agree as to what this film is about. But this may be going too deep from the start. The great abstract painter Mark Rothko said Antonioni's films were, "about nothing with precision." L'Avventura rests not on its plot but on a thematic wavelength that the viewer is responsible for finding. In another text, the critic Joseph Bennet asserts that the "film exists because it is. It does not think. It does not plan ahead. There is no drive, no line. Every movement is a succession of asides." Furthermore, it "systematically subverted the filmic codes, practices and structures in currency at its time." Although L'Avventura is a revolutionary film in it's structure and style, it is also profound in its honest depiction of a society increasingly isolated from one another. Being in a war-ravaged post-WWII Italy, culture no longer had any interest in, "God, love, morality, natural law and eternal order" and had instead adopted the temporal, hedonistic, volcanic eruption-and subsequent burial alive-of sexual revolution, cynical indifference, and material corruption. At Cannes Film Festival-where the film was initially booed-Antoioni declared, "Eros is sick." He argued that in the, "absence of traditional moral restraints, an unbridled animal nature seduces sexual love and, more seriously, shipwrecks agape, leaving men beaten and mean, with no satisfaction, feeling mutually exploited and hardened, yet still filled with desperate yearning." And here we have the character of Sandro. The belief that traditional moral values had been usurped by the existential thinking of Nietzsche and the like had not given the desired expectation. In the philosopher Peter K. McInerny's writings on existentialism, we find what could be the core of what L'Avventura is:

"Without God, there may seem to be no objective values, so that any action or way of living is as good as any other. Without God, human history and our own individual lives are of no significance for the universe at large. Nothing we do will have any impact on the immense and everlasting universe. The individual feels alone and adrift.".