L’Avventura ***** (1960, Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari) – Classic Movie Review 2839

Enigmatic beauty Monica Vitti stars gracefully in one of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s most famous films, L’Avventura (1960).

His screenplay with regular collaborator Tonino Guerra and Elio Bartolini focuses on the effect on a group of rich Italian people when a woman in their party disappears on a yachting holiday during a trip to a deserted volcanic island in the Mediterranean.

When they are about to leave the island, they find the woman has gone missing. During the search for her, her lover and her best friend become attracted to each other. They become lovers and almost forget all about the missing Anna.

This 1960 world cinema masterwork is a mysterious and labyrinthine intellectual puzzle, and a long, uneventful one at 143 minutes. However, it can be a riveting, mesmerising experience for those in the mood to succumb to its dreamy pace and its insights about relationships and of course, as it’s Antonioni, alienation.

Lea Massari plays Anna, the woman who disappears, Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti are her friend and lover Claudia and Sandro who lead the search for her and become attracted.

L’Avventura’s supporters claim that it is one of the cinema’s masterpieces. Antonioni called it ‘a detective story back to front’.

In a tied vote, it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960.

Also in the cast are Dominique Blanchar, James Addams, Lelio Luttazzi, Renzo Ricci, Giovanni Petrucci, Esmeralda Ruspoli, Dorothy De Poliolo and Angela Tommasi Di Lampedusa.

Gabriele Ferzetti, the seductive Italian actor who rose to international prominence in the 1960s after played the dissolute playboy in L’Avventura, died in Rome on December 2 2015, aged 90. He played Lot in John Huston’s The Bible, the railroad baron Morton in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and mob boss Draco in the 1969 James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Monica Vitti (born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli on 3 November 1931 in Rome) died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on 2 February 2022 at the age of 90. The Italian actress is best known for starring in films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in the early-to-mid 1960s, and also for the 1966 caper Modesty Blaise.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2839

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