Watching a universally renowned movie like L’Avventura –Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking masterpiece – can sometimes be a discomfiting experience. The reason is simple, you watch with huge expectations and the viewing experience might sometimes just fail to scale the stratospheric heights you’d hoped it would; something of that sort happened with this movie for me. While a group of blasé, affluent jet-setters is vacationing in a yacht, a successful but jaded architect’s neurotic fiancé goes missing, and during the process of searching for her, he ends up developing a relationship with a beautiful but emotionally fragile lady who also happened to be his fiancé’s best friend. A complex examination of human behaviour and a sharp critique of the shallow decadence of wealthy socialites, it isn’t really difficult to understand what made this the archetypal ‘Art Movie’ – especially given the deeply ambiguous ending. However, on the flip side, the slow, lumbering narrative, numerous moments of seeming inaction, and the long running time, were factors that slightly alienated the movie from me. Further, the acting, though good, in my humble opinion, isn’t great. Perhaps I shouldn’t be expecting a crackling movie like Breathless, 8 ½ or Shoot the Piano Player every time I watch a European movie from that golden era, irrespective of how acclaimed it is.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Avante-Garde
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
