L’Avventura hinges on a brilliant moment of melodrama, which is also something so down to earth that the audience can readily connect with it, in spite of the fact that this is a film about wealthy socialites. A group of loose friends go on a day trip to an island in a yacht. One of their party, Ana, is in a troubled relationship with her fiancé, and disappears off the face of the earth. The group search the rocky, uninhabited island but Ana persists in her vanishing. Later there are reports of another boat in the area, and then reports of her having been seen on the Sicilian mainland. Her fiancé and friend, Sandro and Claudia, go in search of her, but there are tensions between them, which leads to the revelation of a secret which might explain Ana’s disappearance.
This story, which is echoed at the start of La Notte, is direct and straightforward in a film where so much is opaque and confusing. It gives a spine to the film’s 144 minute narrative, even if the second half of the film struggles to maintain the dramatic tension as the focus shifts to Sandro and Claudia’s relationship. As much as anything else, Antonioni is a master of mood. Scenes unfold gradually, allowing the tensions and conflicts to reveal themselves without ever needing to be underlined. The humorous character is later revealed to be heartless, the charmer is stripped bare by the end. There is a preoccupation with what we might now call toxic masculinity, but this is always crafted, never bludgeoned. This leads to the creation of what the textbooks might describe as 3-D characters, albeit the kind of 3-D characters that Anglo-Saxon moviemaking tends to shy away from: complex characters struggling with the simpler things of life like desire, faithfulness, the bricks and mortar of the (post-)Christian societies we inhabit.
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