L’Avventura ***** (1960, Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari) – Classic Movie Review 2,839

Enigmatic beauty Monica Vitti stars gracefully in one of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s most famous films, L’Avventura (1960). Lea Massari plays the young woman who disappears during a boating trip in the Mediterranean.

Enigmatic beauty Monica Vitti stars gracefully in one of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s most famous films, L’Avventura (1960).

His story and screenplay developed with regular collaborator Tonino Guerra and Elio Bartolini focus on the effect on a group of rich Italian people when a young woman in their party disappears on a yachting holiday during a trip to a deserted volcanic island in the Mediterranean.

When they are about to leave the island, they find the woman has gone missing. During the search for her, her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti) become attracted to each other. They become lovers and almost forget all about the missing Anna.

This 1960 world cinema masterwork is a mysterious and labyrinthine intellectual puzzle, and a long, uneventful one at 143 minutes. However, it can be a riveting, mesmerising experience for those in the mood to succumb to its dreamy pace and its insights about relationships and of course, as it’s Antonioni, alienation.

Lea Massari plays Anna, the woman who disappears, Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti are her friend and lover Claudia and Sandro who lead the search for her and become attracted.

L’Avventura’s supporters claim that it is one of the cinema’s masterpieces. Antonioni called it ‘a detective story back to front’. It is an art work rather than an entertainment and might be a challenge to audiences as it focuses on visual composition, mood and character exploration instead of the expected narrative development.

In a tied vote, it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 (shared with Kon Ichikawa’s Odd Obsession).

Also in the cast are Dominique Blanchar, James Addams, Lelio Luttazzi, Renzo Ricci, Giovanni Petrucci, Esmeralda Ruspoli, Dorothy De Poliolo and Angela Tommasi Di Lampedusa.

It was filmed on location in Rome, the Aeolian Islands, and Sicily from August 1959 to 15 January 1960, battling financial and physical difficulties.

The island sequence was mostly filmed on the island Lisca Bianca [White fish bone] with a cast and crew of 50, as well as Panarea, Mondello and Palermo. It was intended to take three weeks, but took four months, with the islands infested by rats, mosquitoes and reptiles and the weather very cold. A week after shooting began, the production company went bankrupt, with cast and crew working for free till funding was found.

The score is by Giovanni Fusco. Antonioni asked him to compose ‘jazz as though it had been written in the Hellenic era’.

It was laughed at and booed at on its premiere in May at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, but after a second screening, the film went on to win the Jury Prize and became an international box office success. 

Its eventual perceived success turned Vitti into a star and promoted the career of Massari,

It is Antonioni’s first film in a trilogy, followed by La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962)

Gabriele Ferzetti, the seductive Italian actor who rose to international prominence in the 1960s after played the dissolute playboy in L’Avventura, died in Rome on December 2 2015, aged 90. He played Lot in John Huston’s The Bible, the railroad baron Morton in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and mob boss Draco in the 1969 James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Monica Vitti (born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli on 3 November 1931 in Rome) died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on 2 February 2022 at the age of 90. The Italian actress is best known for starring in films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in the early-to-mid 1960s, and also for the 1966 caper Modesty Blaise.

Lea Massari, born Anna Maria Massatani (30 June 1933 – 23 June 2025) is known in art cinema as the missing woman in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and as the mother in Louis Malle’s Souffle au Coeur [Murmur of the Heart] (1971). Her career includes Sergio Leone’s debut The Colossus of Rhodes [Il Colosso di Rodi] (1961), The Things of Life [Les choses de la vie] ( 1970) and Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli [Cristo si è fermato a Eboli] (1979), for which she won the Nastro d’Argento for Best Supporting Actress award.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,839

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