Michelangelo Antonioni
L'Avventura

Let's take it easy here, because we're talking about one of the "masters" of Italian cinema: none other than Michelangelo Antonioni.
L'Avventura (1960) is the first of four films inspired by the theme of incommunicability. The remaining three are La Notte, L'Eclisse, and Il Deserto Rosso. In all of them, Monica Vitti plays the leading role. These are challenging parts. Antonioni's cinema in these four films is cerebral and lingering, the pace is relaxed. Relaxed like corpses in decay. But let's proceed calmly.

The film received acclaim from the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in '60, for its attempt to develop a new cinematic language and for the beauty of its images.

PLOT: A group of friends heads by boat to the Aeolian Islands. Anna, chronically bored and tired of her relationship with Sandro, pretends to have been attacked by a shark. Panic spreads on the boat, and the friends decide to stop on a small island. Sandro and Anna have a discussion, and he falls asleep. Thereafter, after a couple of cut scenes, she disappears. Everyone starts looking for Anna. "Anna! Anna!", but Anna is nowhere to be found. This episode will turn Anna into the most famous (dis)appearance in the history of cinema. Meanwhile, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) has cast his eyes on Claudia (Monica Vitti), who in the meantime has begun to fret with pain and guilt for her missing friend. The cops are called, but there is no trace of Anna. L'Avventura continues at this point by train and then to a Sicilian village amidst wild glances, bells, deserted squares, hesitations, marriage proposals, affairs between the silly friend and a seventeen-year-old proto-maudit bourgeois painter (but they are all bourgeois), paranoias, and guilt in abundance. And dead times, down, until the horrible finale.

Dear to the Master is the theme of the bourgeois's boredom and mediocrity, through which he attempts a discourse of immense scope on the pitiful condition of modern man, forced to the fixity of shoes and jacket despite dreams and aspirations. The intent is certainly commendable. Both Il Deserto Rosso and L'Eclisse play the same game, with a discourse (but it would be better to call it more a "mute") based essentially, from an acting point of view, on the expressive paranoias of Vitti (L'Eclisse) and the numerous shots of her staring at walls and antennas with acid-claustrophobic musical backgrounds (Il Deserto Rosso). Especially in this last film, there is the distinct sensation that Vitti's character has ingested (who knows if for real) something like forty acids. However, while Il Deserto Rosso soon gets tiresome for its exasperating formalism and total absence of sensible dialogues (she constantly talks about hesitations, not knowing what to do, and keeps running away shaking her head desperately), L'Eclisse plays its cards much better. The objective alternation between the difficult development of the relationship between Him (Alain Delon) and Her in a definitively empty and architectural city, and the long sequence of Him employed at the Milan Stock Exchange well represents the transience, indeterminacy, and tragedy of human relationships built on cold and impersonal foundations.

Returning to us, L'Avventura has been unanimously handed over by critics to history as a very important and complex film, which marked (for its intrinsic artistic and cultural value) the start of a "anti-spectacular" cinema that would have significant development in the following years, precisely for being the starting point of a process of new cinematic "signification" towards overcoming the usual spectacular canons. In essence, however, L'Avventura is a darn boring, dragging film, at times unwarranted, which in many parts joyfully delves into the realms of self-punishment. The viewer arrives exhausted at the end of the first half and practically on the brink of death by the finale.
But they get there, if only to see how in the world a story that entirely rests on a widespread and contagious sense of frustration to the marrow of interest ends.

To conclude, here I bring a comment found online written by someone who saw this film grasping all its crucial points.

"One of the most boring films ever. The alleged art of Antonioni unfolds in all its dreary power: chilling dialogues, exasperating slowness, metaphysical ambitions. Monica Vitti never so croaky and annoying. Indeed if you remove the characters, interesting landscapes remain. And the characters are so stereotyped that you can't distinguish them from the landscape - apart from the fact that they speak. Antonioni's bourgeois don't know what they want and don't even want it. Almost a relief to see them dispersed and stuck (forever?) hundreds of kilometers away from us."