L'Avventura

Michelangelo Antonioni's first full-blown masterpiece (the title means "The Adventure," but with sexual overtones) was hissed when it premiered at Cannes in 1960; it went on to be hailed by newspapers as disparate as the New York Mirror and the London Times. (There was some uncertainty in the center: the New York Times said the film was "too far out"; the Herald Tribune thought it was "too far in.") Today, at the edge of the millennium, Antonioni's approach to film looks as revolutionary as it did back then. He gave us, for the first time, the cinema of a Copernican universe, where humans are no longer the center of the cosmos. Often they're not the center of his shots: the camera will be looking at a landscape or building and someone will wander into the frame. His use of widescreen lets him show two persons in close-up without bringing them together. What would bring them together? God is conspicuously absent (the only churches we see are closed), just as in real life. So are families.

The plot is disarmingly simple. Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Anna (Lea Massari) are lovers, but whereas Sandro is glib and self-satisfied, Anna seems restless and uncertain about the relationship. During a visit to the Lipari islands (north of Sicily) with some friends, including Anna's chum Claudia (Monica Vitti), Anna disappears. Sandro and Claudia spend the rest of the film combing Sicily, and then Italy, for her, in the process falling in love with each other -- or something like love. In the end, though, they're left with something quite different: each other.

Antonioni's characters are not so much alienated as isolated, left to puzzle out their role in a world that doesn't seem to need them. They fumble toward self-knowledge, often in real time rather than with the "unimportant" moments edited out -- this director's way of asking us to reconsider what's important and what's not. As opposed to Hollywood movies, which are illustrated novels (close your eyes and you won't miss much), his films could almost be silents; Antonioni wants us to look as well as listen, to consider that what his characters do -- what they gaze at, how they move, how they react to one another -- is as telling as the words they speak. In short, this is interactive moviemaking: we're asked not to watch passively, to be manipulated, but to join in the director's painstaking -- and sometimes painful -- investigation of who we are.

-- Jeffrey Gantz