L’Avventura

Viewed August 9, 1999 on video

This movie would bomb so badly if it came out today.  We (Americans) have no patience for a film of this pacing and content.  We’d get flustered by the metaphysical issues haunting these characters as they go on their half-assed search for their friend.  Our lives, for the most part (at least for most of the people I know in the San Francisco area) are just as affluent as these figures (I went sailing a few days after viewing this film), yet we don’t seem to be having the crises they are, or even positing the questions about the meaning of life as Monica Vitti does with her forlorn pouting lips.  It seems to have everything to do with our lifestyle, and yet it doesn’t seem to speak to me at all.  What I wonder is, where does my generation stand in relation to this movie ­ are we past it or behind?

The movie certainly makes a lot of interesting narrative choices, and so it is to be commended historically as a real groundbreaker.  The person who turns out to be the main character is kept in the background for the first half hour, and the person we are most led to care about in the beginning ceases to exist, and then before too long we wonder if we really saw her.  The gradual emergence of the protagonist from a general mass of affluent partiers adds to the feeling of their interchangeable existences.  When they search the island for the missing woman, Antonioni’s camera manages to transform an island getaway into a bleak existential landscape.  The last shot surprisingly falls into classic Italian neo-realism, much in the flavor of Bicycle Thief, La Strada and Two Women.  I would expect an ending more unprecedented, but nonetheless it was compelling and finished the film with a lot of weight.

And yet in spite of all my admiration for his work, the film leaves me cold.  It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know about my life.  You basically just get the idea that the privileged classes of 50s Italy (and America, as art-house audiences extrapolated) carry out meaningless farcical existences.  A woman disappears, and Monica Vitti realizes the pointlessness of her life.  I realized the pointlessness of life some time ago, but I also realized that there are many other ways of seeing life that are just as valid as the morbid view.  What Antonioni doesn’t consider in this film (and what he later seems to acknowledge later in Blow Up) is that just because life doesn’t seem to amount to anything doesn’t mean the argument ends there. 

Something I want to pay closer attention to on my next viewing is the feeling often evoked through Vitti of being a woman in a man’s world, a theme that seems more contemporary than Antonioni’s main metaphysical conceit.

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