Short Take: L'avventura

L'avventura is the most haunting of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's existential dramas. No film can better hold its own with the finest 20th-century literary fiction. The story is about an upper-class young woman (Lea Massari) who disappears during a yacht excursion to the Aeolian Islands off Sicily, and the efforts of her fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti) to search for her in the area communities. But the effects and meanings are not carried by melodramatic tension and plot resolution. The missing woman is never found, and the search for her takes a backseat as the fiancé and the best friend become preoccupied with their romantic interest in each other. As with the most accomplished modernist fiction, the plot isn't really the point. The narrative is just a means to an end. Antonioni's actual subject is upper-class alienation, caprice, and emptiness. It's a place where romance and sex have become momentary escapes from anxiety and loneliness, and glamour and decadence walk hand in hand. Everything is conveyed through nuance, irony, and tone. The famous Antonioni tropes are all present: the aimless walking; people talking to each other with their backs turned; the grandeur of landscape and architecture contrasted with the petty self-absorption of the characters. But the use of those tropes is charged with meaning and never belabored. Antonioni's exquisite sense of shot composition and scene choreography is present as well. The film shows one of the great filmmaking styles at its most eloquent. Vitti and Massari are the standouts in a fine cast, which also includes Dominique Renchar and Renzo Ricci. The elegant black-and-white cinematography is credited to Aldo Scavarda. Antonioni collaborated on the script with Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra. The film's title has two meanings in English: "The Adventure" and "The Fling."