Cinema: The Sickness Unto Death

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L'Avventura (Cino del Duca; Janus), made in Italy by a respected but little-known moviemaker named Michelangelo Antonioni, is a nightmarish masterpiece of tedium, a parable of spiritual purgation, a myth for the Anxious Age.

Part One of the three confluent but contrasting parts of L'Avventura (The Adventure) is set on one of the Aeolian Isles, crests of a vast sunken crater in the Mediterranean. By placing his characters in this dead volcano. Antonioni clearly intends to suggest that they are spiritually extinct. The walking dead are idle-rich Italians, members of a yachting party, who lie sunning like lizards on the lava shelves. Anna (Lea Massari), the vivid brunette, is a restless little disperata who finds her life empty and is sick of filling it with sex. Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna's handsome lover, is a successful architect in his early 405 who can't imagine why anything more than sex is necessary—except of course money. Claudia (Monica Vitti), Anna's girl friend, seems to be just another blonde.

Suddenly a storm comes up. The party has to leave the island. Where is Anna? They call. She does not answer. They ransack the island. She has vanished. Is she dead? Did she run away? The yacht heads back to port, leaving Sandro and Claudia to continue the search.

Part Two, says Antonioni, "seems to describe how a person is searched for. but it really describes how she is forgotten." Anxious, guilty, deeply unsettled and finally exhausted. Sandro looks to Claudia for—comfort? oblivion? sex? It's all the same to Sandro. He is one of those men who, at the least sign of strain or difficulty, reach for a woman the way other men reach for a cigarette. Claudia resists, but when the search takes Sandro to the mainland, she goes along, and the inevitable happens. At first they prosecute the search with determination, but as they become more and more absorbed in their own love affair, they do less and less about Anna. Claudia is the first to face the truth: "At first I was afraid that Anna was dead. Now I'm afraid she is alive."

Part Three moves slowly, relentlessly, as a bulldozer might move an Everest of farina, into the character of Sandro. What is wrong with him? He only knows that he has sold his creative talent for commercial success. On and on and on he goes, looking but not really looking for Anna, avoiding the truth about himself, escaping into sex with Claudia as once he had escaped with Anna and the devil knows how many others; a man turning eternally in the limbo of a living death—and apparently enjoying it. Suddenly it occurs to the spectator that Anna will never be found, that Claudia's love affair will never work out. that Sandro will never amount to anything, that in fact nothing of any importance or interest is going to happen in this interminable (2 hr. 25 min.) picture.