If you like cinema you may have noticed that the poster for this year’s Cannes Film Festival is a tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni.
The poster shows actress Monica Vitti as Claudia in the film L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960) standing with her back to the audience in front of a window that opens up on the sea surrounding the Lipari Island.
When it was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, L’avventura was booed by the audience who didn’t like the long pauses, the psychological investigation, the slow-paced narration of the film and its open end.
Critics liked instead the film and while the Golden Palm went to Fellini’s La dolce vita, L’avventura was awarded the Jury Prize.
Together with L’eclisse and La Notte (I have already mentioned these films in previous posts, last June and last October), L’avventura forms the “trilogy of solitude” or the “trilogy about the failure of romance and relationships”. The three films are indeed a sort of triptych on the inability of human beings to communicate.
Unanimously considered as Antonioni’s breakthrough film, L’avventura was particularly difficult to shoot because of the weather
conditions and the lack of funds. When it came out the movie was also
deemed as obscene and 5 scenes were censored.
The plot revolves around the mysterious disappearance of Anna (Lea Massari) during a yachting trip along the Sicilian coast with her friends. Her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) start looking for her and eventually develop an intense attraction for each other.
The dialogue is sparse to underline the characters' incommunicability: Antonioni portrays men as inadequate and mediocre in the film, while women, and Claudia in particular, are the real protagonists, with their doubts, fears, frustrations and anxieties.
The best thing about L’avventura is actually the way Antonioni films the landscape and the architecture that surrounds the different characters. The dehumanising process the characters go through in the film is indeed associated to the environments that surround them.
The environment and the juxtaposition between natural (Lisca Bianca) and constructed (dreary Noto and the view from the bell tower that opens on the surrounding Baroque buildings) landscapes are indeed used to reflect the characters' state of mind and feelings. In the bell tower scene (check out the short video at the end of this post) for example Sandro (who is an architect) seems to be playing with the buildings around him and, in these shots, whatever surrounds him and Claudia turns into pure design and architecture.
There seems to be no sky, no nature, but just buildings, almost to symbolise the emptiness, existential boredom and crisis of modern human beings.
“I tried to represent the uncertainties, instability and the humiliating contradictions of our feelings in this film,” Antonioni stated in an interview published on Italia Domani in March 1960.
A note on the film costumes: they were designed by Adriana Berselli, but made by the Rome-based Annamode, another famous tailoring house to which I will hopefully dedicate a post in the future.
There will be a special Antonioni tribute on Wednesday 20th May at Cannes where 25 Italian actresses - among them also Claudia Cardinale and Virna Lisi - will take part in a special screening of the restored version of L'avventura.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments