L'Avventura and Federico Fellini's more flamboyant film La Dolce Vita, to which it was continually compared, tugged the European art film toward fashion. Together they inaugurated a vogue among trendy Americans to punctuate their conversations with "Ciao" (often uttered in a petulant, pseudo-Italian accent) instead of "Goodbye."
As the 1960s wore on, Antonioni increasingly succumbed to the taint of fashion. His most successful film, "Blowup," set in swinging London among photographers and models, was clever but shallow. Yet the protagonist's search for an elusive photographic truth was prescient.
Antonioni's vogue ended abruptly in 1970 with the critical and commercial failure of Zabriskie Point. At the time, that movie, his first feature made in the US, was widely misunderstood by fans longing to identify with its young lovers, who dabble in revolutionary politics. When no revolution occurred at the end, the audience that had lined up to see it (I saw its first two New York screenings) left frustrated. In hindsight, its climactic fantasy of a house repeatedly exploding (to the strains of Pink Floyd) predicted the imminent failure of that so-called revolution. The notion that it was just a fantasy was a message nobody wanted to hear.
But Antonioni's fashionableness shouldn't distract us from his accomplishment. He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hyper-eroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language. Here was depicted for the first time on screen a world in which attention deficit disorder, and the uneasy sense of impermanence that goes with it, were already epidemic.
The startling conceptual coup of L'Avventura was the story's unexplained disappearance of a young woman, Anna, from a desolate, rocky island where she and a yachting party have landed. Even before the group, which includes Sandro, leaves the island without finding Anna, Sandro puts the moves on her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti). She resists his advances, but succumbs once they have returned to the mainland.
As the police search for Anna, the members of the party become distracted. Even for Claudia, the movie's conscience and Antonioni's alter ego, the urgency of finding Anna recedes in the heat of her new relationship. The cycle of betrayal culminates with the final scene: Claudia and Sandro are staying in a hotel, and she awakens to find him gone.
Venturing downstairs, she finds him sprawled on a couch with a prostitute, an exhibitionist with whom they had crossed paths earlier, as the prostitute created a paparazzi frenzy in a village they were passing through. This character may be the movies' very first "celebutante." Today she is everywhere.
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