Word: avventura
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...assistant director, a screenwriter (he scripted Federico Fellini's solo feature directorial debut, The White Sheik) and the maker of documentary shorts - was the first true modernist in commercial cinema. His pristine imagery and elegant compositions taught viewers to watch a movie, not just see it. Calling L'Avventura "easily, the film of the year," critic Pauline Kael hailed it for demonstrating "that the possibilities for serious, cultivated, personal film expression in the film medium were not yet exhausted." (The next year, she castigated La Notte, which traced the disintegration of a marriage during a 12-hour soiree...
...interesting why? Why watch this, especially for the 2hr.23mins. L'Avventura takes to unravel? The movie is the story of... well, that was the problem. The story, so to speak, focused on the trip a few wealthy layabouts take to a rocky island near Sicily. One of the men, Sandro (Gabrielle Ferzetti), has come with his mistress Anna (Lea Massari) and Anna's friend Claudia (Vitti). Anna has been quarreling with her beau, and 25 mins. into the film, she vanishes. Sandro and Claudia look and look and look and...don't find her. The two searchers get sidetracked into...
...this film." The Cannes Jury, headed by novelist Georges Simenon, sided with the petitioners, giving the film second prize "for a new movie language and the beauty of its images." Informed world opinion followed soon enough. In a 1962 poll by Sight & Sound magazine, international critics rated L'Avventura the second greatest film of all time, behind Citizen Kane...
...Seen today, 47 years later, L'Avventura seems easy to read, a treat to watch and a pretty profound parable on the limits of fidelity and friendship. The movie's title, which translates as The Adventure, was not a joke; it was an apt appraisal of the intellectual thrills the film would provide for its viewers. Adventure was also the word for the challenges in form and content that Antonioni and other '60s pioneers would bring to '60s cinema. And yet that first, boorish benighted Cannes audience did have a couple of very conventional reasons to be outraged...
...told a journalist. "I think those mechanisms are false." The old formulas had become as stylized as kabuki, as stale as week-old breadsticks. Hollywood stuck to boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl, but Antonioni didn't see why he had to. How about, in L'Avventura, boy-loses-girl, boy-finds-another-girl-and- gives-up-searching-for-the-first-girl? (In fact, the film has not only a twist ending that is both sardonic and poignant but a big display of emotion: hot tears of remorse or self-pity, take your pick. If you haven...