The Adventure

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura was his response to Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Both Italian directors tried to create a story about senselessness and emptiness in the search for worldly pleasures. Only Fellini's characters were middle-class wasters who wasted their lives creating nothing; Antonioni's characters are people who, if they were a little more perverted, could easily be found in the books of Marquis De Sade.

It is a story about people who cannot feel and, therefore, turn to their fellow men and understand once more that they feel nothing. The film itself has no plot and is but a search without reason, beginning without conclusion, making the words L'Avventura, the adventure, an obvious intent of writing a parody.

A group of wealthy friends are cruising the sea near Sicily and they anchor near an island, swim to the shore and begin to explore it. Anna (Lea Massari), after a quarrel with her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti), has been overheard saying she wants to be left alone. After a while, Anna cannot be found and they half- interestedly look for her. Among the rocks and Mediterranean bushes, she just cannot hide and they abandon the project. After a while, Anna's lover and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), will decide to start their relationship.

The film is not about this story which is an introduction to the value of these people who have nothing tangible, who are on the verge of disappearing, who are barely existing.

The yacht they came on is sent for help and, after a while, returns with police and Anna's father who seems annoyed that he was taken away for something so insignificant as his daughter. There is the possibility that Anna actually left on another boat, but the film never reveals it. The Mediterranean scenery is haunting, glorious, magnificent; and the rich people from the yacht just look, as they say in Bosnia, as a "pig in Teheran" within that untamed beauty.

Another of the yacht crowd, Gloria (Dorothy De Poliolo), a sexy writer who, walking through the streets of the working class, forgets why she tries to be sexy. When Anna is gone, no one mourns her. Sandro and Claudia become lovers, but he only wants her in front of others, sleeping with a prostitute at night.

The question is now, why don't we have more films like L'Avventura, where the rush for power and money-grabbing is portrayed for what it is? We no longer ask about our purpose here on Earth. Perhaps Umberto Eco was right--Perhaps this is the beginning of the New Dark Ages.

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