Daily Movie Rec 2/25/24
L'Avventura (1960)
"Everything is becoming so hideously easy. Even forgetting pain."
Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cinematography by: Aldo Scavarda
Plot:
A young woman named Anna disappears without a trace on an island stop during a yachting trip, and before the search has even ended, her lothario boyfriend starts an affair with Anna's distraught best friend, Claudia.
Reasons to watch:
Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni flipped film grammar on its head with L'Avventura, helping to establish the dreamlike and voyeuristic style of filmmaking known as Slow Cinema, where the camera is less involved and often becomes more of a disembodied ghost observing characters from afar, with long, extended takes where very little happens. In his densely existential films full of ennui, amorality, and spiritual emptiness, he frequently staged his actors facing away from each other or with backs turned to the camera, alienating the audience from the characters and symbolizing his views on the erosion of communication in the modern world, where people are forgetting how to connect with each other in meaningful ways - relationships devolving into nothing but facades and performances, abandoned at the slightest inconvenience and the past instantly dismissed for the newest point of interest. The film would also mark the first of Antonioni's collaborations with his talented and stunning muse Monica Vitti, and while L'Avventura's radical style and profound malaise led to such intense booing during its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival that the pair fled the theater, it would go on to win the festival's Jury Prize and become one of European cinema's most influential works (and Antononioni would also become one of my favorite directors - his compositions and sense of atmosphere are unreal and you know I eat up all things existential).
Where to watch:
The Criterion Channel/Max/Kanopy
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