Antonioni's Stark View Reinterpretted

Michelango Antonioni's "L'Avventura" has been called one of the 10 best films of all time (International Critics Poll, Sight and Sound), a boring film about boredom (John Simon) and, in Antonioni's own words, "a mystery film in reverse," but, to this reviewer's knowledge, it has not yet been called the ultimate slacker film.

And 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.

The film's essential episode, the disappearance of the petulant Anna (Lea Massari), occurs within the first hour. A luxury yacht's cargo of listless passengers disembarks on a rocky, semi-deserted island. Anna, moody, beautiful and brown-haired, has recently sent a fake alarm through the party when she cries "shark" in pretend. This act of immature attention-getting sets the scene of her disappearance, which will ultimately become the only certainty in the film, in a context of folly and childish insignificance.

The cast of wealthy characters wanders the rocks and exchanges terse, strained phrases. They drift in and out of frame with carelessness and distraction. The barrenness of the island and the incessant pounding of the surf is infinitely suited to the disappearance of the girl and the distraught attempts at personal interactions that the remaining characters undertake.

Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna's fiance and something of a corporate sell-out, becomes enthralled by Anna's best friend, the blond Claudia (Monica Vitti). After an initial, ambivalent embrace between Sandro and Claudia in the still mooredyacht, the movie drifts away from the scene of Anna's disappearance and away from Anna herself.

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.

In one powerful scene in a Sicilian town square, she is surrounded by silent, leering men. The men are detestable in their predatory stances, but the viewer, taunted and manipulated by her beauty, seeks to understand her, to circle her and to communicate desire to her in much the same way. Instead of comprehension and compassion, more often than not the viewer is given Vitti's neck and the back of her head, in a close-up foreground shot.

For all of its narrative looseness, "L'Avventura" is compositionally air-tight. Emotional distance is made literal on screen. The stark black and white of even starker landscapes and the often contrasting coloring of clothes or hair serve to accentuate the social distance with which Claudia, Sandro and their acquaintances struggle.

A common shot places a figure in the extreme foreground and the extreme background. Women run or walk tensely down long, narrow hall-ways that force the gaze nearly through the plane of the movie screen. The camera leans over a rocky cliff, peering over men's shoulders to a search party far below. Sandro looks over his shoulder to a women standing in front of a painting who turns to look at him.

The central mystery and plot element of the film, Anna's disappearance, is never explained or resolved. The characters' lives remain aimless, disenchanted, fraught with a low-lying depression and highlighted by occasional bouts of manic energy. Claudia and Sandro drift towards their own terrible resolution without resolution, while the rest of the characters drift out of the film entirely.

As 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."

The 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.

In the end, the 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."