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L'Avventura - Criterion Collection Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 30 Reviews)

Slow, but wonderful; beautiful print
With Antonioni's The Passenger having recently been re-released on DVD, and just having bought a new player and LCD screen, I've gotten on an Antonioni binge, and let me say, first of all, that this print is spectacular. It is a beautiful remastering job, and I've got to say that this alone made the experience of this picture very different from when I saw it in college years ago. The images are just gorgeous.

As with the much later film, The Passenger, the guts of this film are not in the plot. The plot (which is well-described in other reviews) is, frankly, presented in a slow, ambling, and sometimes almost aimless manner. As with The Passenger, the narrative thread is often enough not clear, and more questions are raised than answered.

But, at least for this viewer, that causes the focus of attention to turn more to the visual content of the film, and the rhythm. In that way, it weaves it's magic. And a print of this quality really helps make that happen. Sure, I agree with those that find the ending unsatisfying. But so can be the real world. And with a willing immersion in Antonioni's visual language, we have the opportunity to see another way to view the world, and, perhaps strangely (in the midst of all of this talk of alienation and emptiness), that way can be very beautiful, indeed. Strongly recommended, but give it some patience.

Slow, sad, too-long and most of all: unresolved......
This review is for the 2001 Criterion Collection DVD.

I typically enjoy Italian cinema, mainly for its vitality and zest for life. Unfortunately, this film had very little of that. The movie starts off strong with a fascinating boat trip among some intriguing islands in the Mediterranean Sea with the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful young woman. The plot then meanders into a slow paced melodrama between the boyfriend of the missing girl and the missing girl's best female friend. This relationship is destined for doom for a number of reasons and neither are sympathetic characters. But worst of all, the central mystery of the story is never resolved, especially for a movie this long (approximately 2 hrs. 20 minutes). Why people hype this as a great film is beyond me. I can only be grateful that I rented this DVD and didn't buy it.


Movie: D+

DVD Quality: A

Excellent
For the few reviewers that seem disappointed and perplexed by this movie and the "unresolved" ending, all I can say is "I felt the same way when I first saw this masterpiece". Advice: watch it with the commentary after you see the film and then wait a couple of weeks and watch it again, you will be blown away.
Synopsis: Rich girl travels with some friends on a yacht, they stop on an island, she disappears. One of her friends goes searching for her with the missing girls boyfriend.
You see that is the way a movie studio or viewer today might say that this film is about. Yet it isn't really. It is really the "adventure" or quest of a young woman (the rich girls friend) into full womanhood.
I remember watching this film one day and getting to the end and thinking "I don't get it". A whirlwind of questions came to mind, and then I thought I should watch it with the commentary, see if that would help. And it did.
The imagery is so well explained that you think how is it that you didn't see that. The way the director used nature to say so much about his characters. Examples: the island they all disembark on is as dry and lifeless as the lives they all live. The boyfriend always seems to be surrounded in the background by incredible architecture , yet he has sold out of his dream to build great things. The close-up of rich girl and boy-toy having sex, and you can tell she couldn't care less. The last scene where on the broken boy-toys side of the screen all you see is a blank wall, but on our heroines side there's a volcano.
I mean how can you go wrong with scenes like these? And those are just a few. But then again you have to go to this film with the mentality that it is not just a bunch of nonsense on screen like unfortunately we see too much of today. You are actually watching a work of art, and like all works of art different people will have different points of view.
So give it a chance and don't go thinking you will find easy answers to the questions it makes. Life is full of questions, and would it be real art if it didn't make you ponder these questions?

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