Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #21
Each of our individual identities gets heavily informed by the people around us. When we're impressionable children, the behavior and characteristics displayed by our parents to be inherited by the children they raise while the de facto traits needed to be one of the "popular" people in High School is likely going to be imitated by those looking to obtain some sort of higher social status. This is one of those universal psychological quirks of us as a species that show easily susceptible we can be in order to gain acceptance from our fellow peers. For the two individuals at the center of L'avventura, the entire dynamic they share is upended when a woman they're both dearly close to goes missing under mysterious circumstances.
It was supposed to be a super chill getaway to some nearby islands, nothing too major, just a chance for some fun in the sun. That was the intention of Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) when he took his girlfriend, Anna (Lea Massari) and a bunch of their pals, including Anna's close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), out to this secluded group of islands. But soon, Anna vanishes, leaving the entire group in a tissy, especially Sandro who hopes nothing awful has happened to his lover. While searching for her across the islands and then back on the mainland, something funny happens; Sandro and Anna begin to fancy each other in a deeply romantic and personal way.
All the while the two are searching for the missing Anna, both Sandro and Claudia are falling deeper and deeper in love with each other. But just before the two realize there's a romantic spark blossoming between the duo is the entire first half of L'avventura, which is handily the strongest portion of this movie. Writer/director Michaelangelo Antonioni (who wrote the screenplay with two other individuals) pens some solid rapport between Sandro and Anna in their opening scenes that show how the duo are at an impasse romantically in a naturalistic manner that doesn't break the grounded aesthetic the rest of the movie is conveying.
Soon after establishing their fractured relationship, Anna goes missing, which segues into the individuals in Sandro's group becoming more and more panicked at this woman's abrupt disappearance. All of the actors compiled for this scene do a tremendous job emanating a scared disposition that helps the uncertain tone of these sequences come alive. The viewer doesn't know what on Earth could have happened to Anna out in these more isolated pieces of terrain and the various characters are able to reinforce that thought process in their actions and dialogue delivery by way of the strong acting given off by their individual performers.
Soon afterward, Sandro and Claudia go searching for the missing Anna, picking up on tidbits and pieces of gossip that indicate locations where she might have recently been. This is where I found my own interest waning in the proceedings, as the small-scale intimate depiction of grappling with the immediate loss of a loved one gives way to more episodic investigative plot points. Certainly, Antonioni delivers some strong visual choices in his directing and the screenplay still delivers plenty of good dialogue, but as the scope of the story expands in Sandro and Claudia's hunt for Anna, the quality of the movie can't help but shrink.
It still remains a plenty interesting affair though, especially in the depiction of Sandro and Claudia falling into an impromptu romance with each other. There's a steamy element to their fling for sure but also an intriguing tragic quality, as both seem to be finding comfort in each other as a way to cope with the loss of a woman (Anna) they were both close to. In the process though, they're pushing Anna out of their minds, with Claudia even noting in one of the final scenes of L'avventura that she now wishes Anna wouldn't even come back since she could jeopardize her newfound romance with Sandro. Like I said, our identities get informed by our surroundings and L'avventura has the identities of Sandro and Claudia thoroughly changed, for better and for worse, by an unforeseen tragic disappearance.
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