Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...George Amberg has written of "L'Avventura," Antonioni's characters are "failing without access to the reasons." In the American idiom, Joan Didion wrote in the late '60s of the young hippies of Haight-Ashbury that they were "waiting to be given the words...
...that, depending on how you define slacker, is what it is. The characters in Antonioni's 1961 critically acclaimed masterpiece do not do anything. They loll onboard a luxury yacht off the coast of Sicily, drive through the countryside in open convertibles, and pass each other in the halls of rich hotels and apartments. Antonioni's beautiful women and their idle, sour men lack a moral structure to their actions and, along the same lines, Antonioni's film lacks a narrative structure for its own action...
Monica Vitti is the center of this movie, as far as it can be said to have one. The viewer is left with her beautiful face, her dynamic hair, the motions of her hands, as clues to the meaning of Antonioni's relentlessly difficult and oppresive representation of human interaction. She becomes a crucial element of the stark, geometric environment in which she lives. Her feelings, it seems, hold the clue to the movie's elusive meaning and moral framework. But her feelings are inscrutable...
...degree to which we are still waiting, or still failing without access to the reasons has become a salient point to legions of more or less listless young people. Antonioni offers no answers, and his attempts at tenderness are few and far between, but "L'Avventura" frames a vocabulary of a kind of despair, both poignant and banal, that can speak for a part of today's unnamed generation...
...only news to report for Antonioni and his adventure is that his answer to the question "How are you!" is almost always "I'm awful...