IDEALS THAT LACK COMFORTING POETRY
It was loudly booed. The year was 1960, the place was Cannes and the film was L’Avventura. Two years later it was voted one of the ten best films of al time in an international poll conducted by a British cinema journal. In those two intervening years, audiences in Europe, and more slowly, in America, had begun to perceive that Michaelangelo Antonioni’s film is a major work. Since then, it has not only influenced other film makers and the taste of the public, but has come to be seen as a milestone.
Even when advanced and advancing ideas have been accepted in, say, books and theatre going circles, it is still an act of courage to take those ideas, without compromise, into the world of film, a medium of immensely wider reach and greater expense. Of all the memorable works in film history, only a relative few have pioneered in this way, and among them is ”L’Avventura”.
L'Avventura, 1960.
By the late 1950′s, the prevalent and preponderant postwar intellectual climate had been coalesced and crystallized in the novels of Sartre, Camus and Beckett among others. The first fully committed, mature film in this general vein was made by Antonini. However, his work is more than a mee-too tail wagging of an accepted dog; its very existence as film made it new. If different art forms are more than different containers into which identical concepts can be poured, the ”L’Avventura” was an original recipe.
Antonioni ( 1912- 2007) did not get backing for his first feature film, until the relatively late age of thirty-eight. By 1957 he had made four more, though none of them was notably successful, though some critics recognized from the start that a unique talent was becoming manifest. Then aged forty-five, increasingly determined to do only what he wanted to do and finding it increasingly difficult to get backing because he had no ringing success behind him, he spent two years before he raised the necessary funding, even to begin ”L’Avventura”. The subject, as usual, was his own and was worked out with the aid of the novelist and poet Tonino Guerra, assisted by Elio Bartolini. The picture was finished under extremely difficult condition. The location shooting was hard and the money was scarce.
The hostile public reception at Cannes, was , in a non cynical sense, one proof that Antonini had succeeded in his ambition to break new ground. Right after the disastrous premiere a group of directors and critics signed a statement supporting Antonioni, and within months the picture was launched on its troublesome, troubling, significant career.
The story line is straightforward. Anna, a wealthy young Roman, is a guest on a yachting cruise off Sicily. She has been accompanied by her lover, Sandro, a successful architect in his forties, and by Claudia, a girlfriend of hers, apparently, the only one on the cruise who is not well-to-do. The yacht stops for a bit on a small rocky Aeolian island, and Anna disappears. A slight clue leads to Sicily, where she might have gone, in secret whimsey, by boat. The yacht sails to Sicily. After an inconsequential police inquiry, Sandro and Claudia begin a private search for Anna.
The search is undertaken with increasing laxness, and in a few days they become lovers. Soon they rejoin their yachting friends in a luxury hotel. That night Claudia retires alone, and comes down early next morning, to find Sandro making love with a girl he has picked up. After her shock, and after his, Claudia is reconciled to Sandro’s behavior, and also to her own acceptance of it.
Antonioni’s first great act of daring is in this ”simple” story, that progresses without rigid plotting rules. First, the story affronts conventional audience expectations by starting with one heroine and abruptly switching to another before the film is one third along. The story of Anna-Sandro becomes Claudia-Sandro, and what is more, the disappearance of Anna is never explained.
Secondly, the audience is asked to sympathize with a girl who replaces her friend as a man<s mistress within a few days of Anna’s disappearance , and to sympathize with the man who is the lover of both. Claudia’s actions are based on an honesty rarely found in private life, let alone in popular art. Finally, the audience is asked to accept Claudia’s relatively quick acceptance of Sandro<s infidelity. This acceptance is the explosion that forces the consequences of the film’s adventure, the moral adventure of the title, into the characters’ consciousness.
Thus, the story rests basically on radical candor, the recognition of moral change, of dissolution and a new resolution. After WWII, Antonioni is showing us a generation stripped of poignancy, a Western ethos burnt to the embers by nuclear holocaust and gassed lifeless. His film is about people looking for ways to live and relate in a moral landscape burned clean even of pathos. Anna, in her discontent at the opening, Claudia, even Sandro, are people refusing to despair of decency because they no longer have ideals to cuddle them, ideals that, as the film implies, had been imposed on human reality and now lack even a comforting poetry.
Existentialism has become a cheapened, watered down word, but as an idea, it is serious. It is the belief that human beings can find a rationale, a morality, in the living of their lives, rather than huddling under a canopy of doctrine constructed to reassure. Man ,says Sartre, ” is nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is… our aim is to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values… ” And he adds that in this pursuit ” it is not only one,s self that one discovers… but those of others, too”.
Claudia and Sandro, thrown into a situation where they once might have behaved otherwise because of prettily fabricated moralities, try to act with such truth as they can find in themselves an each other.
“But right away our attention was drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then toward one another. So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.
… that Antonioni’s visual language was keeping us focused on the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo, which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly, inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional shortcomings of the characters — Sandro’s frustration, Claudia’s self-deprecation — quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another “adventure,” and then another and another. Just like that opening theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and dissipating. Endlessly.
Where almost every other movie I’d seen wound things up, “L’Avventura” wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness, cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.” ( Martin Scorsese)
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