Antonioni's "L'Avventura" (1960)

 

Three ways to think about this:

(1) You didn't see the small rowboat rowing away from the island. (Which I didn't upon first viewing; just caught it when told to by the Commentary.) And thus you feel annoyed with friend and boyfriend of the missing woman for hooking up so quickly, and keep waiting for the missing woman to show up and create some personal drama, or else for her dead body to show up and create some drama re who might be responsible.

(2) You saw the small rowboat. You think that maybe the missing woman is just existentially escaping and is now traveling across Italy (as her friend/boyfriend seem to think while following her potential path as reported by the local media) and will turn up eventually, hopefully right when the friend and boyfriend are having sex in the abandoned city.

(3) After about an hour, you give up on the non-existent plot and simply watch Antonioni's pretty shots and not-so-pretty decadent rich characters, which both tell us: (a) Old World is better than New World (architecturally at least). Many scenes of classic architecture re-purposed to generic 1960 office buildings, and of beautiful buildings and streets marred by TV antennas and wires. (b) Men are all sexual predators to some degree (both crude guys on the street and the shallow boyfriend, Sandro). (c) All relations between men and women, rich or poor, are utterly false (as evidenced by every single pair in this film, from the leads to minor-character marriages to a random young couple on a train).

Monica Vitti is the "Adventurer" in this film. Guilt-stricken while simultaneously attracted to her missing friend's lover. And also fascinated/repulsed by the luxurious world she finds herself in while ostensibly searching for her friend. (She's a lower-middle-class "sensible" girl who takes what people say at face value, and is rather confused when they nonchalantly reveal to her that what they said yesterday is not the same as what they might mean today.)

#3 is the best way to watch this film, I think. The stated "missing-girl plot" is not the point at all. Antonioni wants you to see how ugly and fleeting all modern (1960) personal relations are in relation to their ancient backdrop. (Two books left in the missing girl's bag: The Bible and Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night -- the latter a 1934 forerunner of psychologically horrific/naturalistic marital and coupled states on display in this film that would soon become de rigueur in both fiction and film by the 1970s.)