One of my favourite books of all time is The Stranger by Albert Camus. In many ways it changed my perspective on things. Alienation and existentialism were core parts of the book, and I really got interested in this. Its thus a bit strange that I took so long to watch Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, a film inspired by these themes. There’s another film from the same year, La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), so I knew I inevitably were going to compare these two films. La Dolce Vita also dealt with similar themes and techniques. And indeed, La Dolce Vita is one of my favourite films of all time, so I was really looking forward to seeing how Antonioni’s film would compare.
L’Avventura deals with the emptiness and social complexities of modern life. The characters keep searching for something, whether it’s the literal plot of the film or simply some form of human contact. Everyone in this film feels distanced, even when they love they are still detached from each other. Two characters realize their love for one-another, but how long will it last. In many ways, this is a very bleak film, portraying the world as empty and detached. The characters wander around with no clear purpose or goal. They do have a goal in the beginning of the film, but as it progresses they lose sight of this. There is a lot of time where nothing specific is going on in the frame, what it does is creating the sub-text of the frame of mind the characters have, making us try to look into their lives. The cinematography is used to great effect to create this feeling of emptiness, lingering on wide shots that do not service the plot, but creates the existentialism the characters are feeling. Time is expanded in the film, creating an almost droning pace, the audience constantly questions the characters intents or purpose. In many ways, as discussed many times, Antonioni created a new sort of film language. It’s an extension of the Italian neorealist language that had been developed the last 15 years, but it also deviates from this movement. It inserts the existentialism that Sartre and Camus had developed after the war, and putting it into cinematic form. Its form is that it uses elaborate methods to convey the emptiness in the characters lives. This is achieved through long-takes, shots that don’t have anything to do with the plot, but simply “observe”, to create meanings of the inner lives of the characters. Not using close-ups or elaborate editing techniques, the film conveys the mood of emptiness, the characters go on with their lives with no particular purpose, pretty radical compared to the classic narrative of the Hollywood movie. In classical Hollywood storytelling the characters have to have an obstacle, and they have to overcome it. In Antonioni’s films the characters don’t even know what their obstacle is, or what they should do to overcome whatever it is.
There are debates to whether L’Avventura is a relevant or good film, and I would say that it is both. Firstly we will discard that tired “it’s boring” argument. But there are also people who believe the film doesn’t convey anything. It is in many ways partly true. The film doesn’t have any elaborate themes; it lingers on love but doesn’t make any clear statement about it, but remains ambiguous. I feel that what Antonioni is trying to achieve is to convey the emptiness and isolation of his characters in the modern world. He doesn’t have any agenda I too believe. The film looks at the upper-class, but unlike Buñuel, he doesn’t satirize them or criticize them. Rather, he shows how they lose sight of the meaning of life through their hollow lives. They wander around in what seems a world without a coherent meaning. This is contributed to by the aforementioned use of non-linear narrative, with no particular plot. I feel Antonioni succeeds very well here, and would argue that his films do have a certain purpose, but they are detached and non-political. He’s extending the feeling of a cold and empty world unto the screen, and it is a remarkable achievement in the history of cinema. Fellini as said made a similar film with La Dolce Vita, but the form itself is very different between the two films. But I do believe there remains some friction between what people think of Antonioni’s films, but I believe this to be a remarkable piece of cinema, something unique that you rarely see, a film that truly changed ways in which films can express their ideas.
If you do decide to get this, get the excellent Criterion version, although I guess for most film-buffs that goes without saying. Watch it with a very open mind, it uses the language of cinema in a very different way than other films of the period did, or films still do.
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