Michaelangelo Antonioni is apparently one of the great Italian directors and it’s on me that I have neither heard of him nor watched any of his films. This one regularly makes it onto lists of the world’s greatest films so it was an obvious choice to get to get to know this director. Unfortunately it was very wrong of me to expect something similar to Federico Fellini. While it isn’t difficult to tell what’s going on in this film, it is often impossible to figure the why of it or what to expect next. This made L’Avventura a very frustrating watch for me.

Anna is the daughter of a diplomat whose fiancé Sandro is often away on business so that they are able to meet only every few months. Her best friend Claudia accompanies her and Sandro as they join a cruise on Mediterranean with some wealthy friends. While the group stops over on a small, rocky island, Anna expresses her frustration to Sandro about how they are often apart. Shortly afterwards she disappears. Despite combing the entire island and calling in the police, they fail to find any trace of Anna. During the search however Sandro and Claudia seem attracted to each other. Claudia is torn between her loyalty to Anna and her feelings for Sandro, but as she joins Sandro in searching for Anna across the countryside, she eventually succumbs to her emotions.

This pithy summary makes it seem like the plot goes in a straight line but it doesn’t. There are distractions and digressions galore and you don’t know which ones are significant and which ones will be abruptly dropped. For example, one thread deals with Giulia, one of the rich friends whose husband, Corrado, continually mocks her for her vapid and repetitive comments. In another scene, Sandro arrives in town only to note a huge commotion around a self-proclaimed writer and aspiring actress. In each of these instances, it’s confusing to the audience why the director is choosing to show these scenes and how they pertain to the main plot. The director’s choices about camera placement and movement contribute to keep the audience off balance. Some of the scenes are shot in such a way as to suggest that Sandro and Claudia are being watched by an unseen observer, carrying the implication that the observer might be Anna. Nothing comes of this yet the camera angles must be deliberate.

The film opens with a note saying that this film enriched the language of cinema. Apparently critics feel that by upsetting the usual expectations of genre and what can and should happen in a film, L’Avventura both surprised and delighted many people. There’s no denying the craftsmanship involved. The composition is fantastic and the images absolutely enthralling. Still, this film had many doubters even back when it was first released. When it was first screened at Cannes, it was booed and audiences walked out, and the director had to flee. It wasn’t only later after critics had more time to reflect on it that it earned its reputation as a great film. The production of this film was riddled with trouble as well, beset by budget problems and taking unexpectedly long amounts of time to film even simple scenes.

For my part, I must admit to being mostly befuddled by it. I can see that its themes include a critique of the leisurely elite. You can see how emotionally unaffected they seem to be by Anna’s disappearance. One of them, Patrizia, even accepts that Sandro has already moved on from Anna to Claudia in the space of a few days as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Claudia’s own transformation from being the only person who is frantic about Anna to being fearful that she does indeed return is as chilling to us as it is to her. Unfortunately most of what the film is trying to say just flies by me. I can’t see the point of most of the scenes and so quickly become bored and frustrated. For these reasons while I can admire the beauty of the images and the excellence of the performances, I find it impossible to appreciate the film as a whole and therefore can’t recommend it.