L'Avventura again, and again

Here is an early post of mine from 2 years ago, on Antononi's L'AVVENTURA:

The late English film critic and writer Alexander Walker [whom I used to see around town regularly] was very perceptive in his movie reviews and his biographies on the likes of Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, Garbo and the silent era. His Thursday reviews were essential reading.

Here are his comments from a recommendation on a screening of L'AVVENTURA:

"Not all great movies, as Pauline Kael tartly observed, are received "in an atmosphere of incense burning". Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA was greeted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival with a storm of cat-calling and booing. Yet within the year it had become the most fashionable film in European arthouses, and one that set the tone of other bleakly visionary film-makers. It begins with an almost glossy magazine depiction of the affluent Rome middle-class on a yachting holiday in the Lipari islands. Tensions are perceptible, but enigmatically conveyed. Then, as they prepare to leave an island, one woman (Lea Massari) is found to be missing. A search is mounted. With marvellous sleight-of-hand, Antonioni misdirects our attention: gradually we realise that instead of being looked for by her friends, she is being forgotten as two of them fall in love. The film changes key subtly, yet again to suggest how the emotions of a social class have become deadened and selfish. Monica Vitti made her name with this puzzle picture. The last sequence in a Taormina luxury hotel became notorious for her apparantly endless walk through the midnight corridors to discover her treacherous lover (Gabriele Ferzetti). It tried the patience of the black-tie crowd beyond endurance; yet The Walk soon became the trademark of other heroines, in other movies, who exemplified the sick soul of sixties Europe."

L'AVVENTURA was though the most problematic of the Antonioni films for me, I much preferred L'ECLISSE but now I have seen L'AVVENTURA a few more times and suddenly I think its wonderful in all its stark beauty. Our arty film channel Film4 ran it again last week, and despite having the Criterion dvd, I recorded it and found myself returning to it several times. It is pure cinema and I can now lose myself in it repeatedly. The first section on the island is brilliant - the photographs here show what a difficult shoot it must have been on the island in that magic year 1959. Monica Vitti is mesmerising and its a very multi-faceted performance: her anguish on the island searching for Anna, then trying to evade Sandro and finally giving in to her feelings and being deliriously in love and then that climax at the hotel in Taormina in that cold dawn ... a gold plated classic then and as I said in other posts on it, it and PSYCHO usher in that new modern world of 1960, both in their way about a woman who disappears and the people looking for her.

L'Avventura again & another French flick

L’AVVENTURA – this Antonioni classic has been screened a few times lately here in the UK and although I have the dvd I keep been drawn back to it. It is indeed a masterwork and has caused considerable opinion ever since it opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960. Fascinating that at the same time as Hitchcock was filming PSYCHO Antonioni was also creating the story of a woman who vanishes and the people looking for her. Hitch shows us what happens in his masterwork, whereas Antonioni doesn’t, as we become involved in the story of Sandro and Claudia. Monica Vitti is indeed mesmerising here and it is a great performance, no wonder she became the face of arthouse cinema. It remains a very unsettling film, particularly those scenes on the remote island as we speculate on what happened to Lea Massari, and that bleak dawn at the hotel in Taormina at the end. One could say that this and PSYCHO really ushered in the new cinema age in 1960. Giovanni Fusco's score and those great black and white images are simply perfect for those characters in those landscapes prefiguring Antonioni's later films.



Another Julien Duvivier thriller, from 1956 this time: VOICI LE TEMPS DES ASSASSINS, which it was a pleasure to see last week. With most movies even if one has not seen them already one tends to know a lot about them, but these French thrillers which one knows nothing about turn out to be marvellously gripping and entertaining, like Duvivier’s CHAIR DE POULE (HIGHWAY PICKUP) I was raving about a few weeks ago.

Here we have Jean Gabin in his element as the successful restaurant owner in Les Halles, Paris, 20 years after divorcing his grasping wife, but along comes a shy young girl to tell him the ex-wife has now died leaving her, her daughter, alone and penniless. Gabin takes her in and gives her a job, but we begin to suspect the girl (Danielle Delorme) has her own agenda – and so it proves, as we see her plotting against him and planning to take over the business. Gerard Blain is Gabin’s protégé she has to get rid of first …. His aged mother though sees through her right away [and is a dab hand with her whip] so the stage is set for some tense moments, particularly when the ex-wife reappears. Nicely worked out and great to see Gabin at his considerable peak running his kitchen, coping with his fearsome mother and falling for a schemer.