L'Avventura

One of the good things about Netflix is that one can get old movies that need another viewing. We revisited Antonioni's L'Avventura, (1960). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053619/.

We saw the movie quite a few years after it came out, on a quest to see Fellini and Antonioni and deSica and all the great Italian directors. By the way, don't bother with Stromboli, it was awful. The scandal surrounding the director (Rosselini) and Ingrid Bergman made the movie famous but not good.

Watching L'Avventura, we had flashbacks to Fellini, and even Chinatown (all the windows, doorways and arches) , and Last Year at Marienbad (long hallways). I had remembered the first part of the movie but very little of the second. All the great 60's movies (Chinatown was 1974, but the U.S. was still behind the curve cinema-wise, although The Graduate changed all that).

After watching the movie, we watched it again with the commentary, which of course mentioned some things that we had overlooked or simply not seen. Very interesting.

Monica Vitti looked alternately, like one of my friends from college and also like a Boston writer I know now. I want to see The Red Desert, but Netflix doesn't yet have it.

In the movie, we see a Sicily that doesn't necessarily look like a Sicily from guidebooks, and get to know an aimless, uppercrust society that was unfamiliar to Americans at the time, the idle, amoral rich. Now of course, we are awash with them, all the "celebrities" who do nothing or very little and, well, you know who I mean. There is something about having to go to work every day to survive that keeps one focused.

Being on a cruise aboard a private yacht is . . . how can I say this. . . the open sea and islands mingle with the idea of erotic possibilities. Which of course is what happened in the movie, and La Dolce Vita was omnipresent.

I don't want to give away the plot in case you haven't seen it, but instead of renting Dumb and Dumber or Cheech and Chong (you don't, do you?) pick up L'Avventura or La Dolce Vita, Blow Up, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Knife in the Water, 8 1/2, or any of the Italian or French New Wave directors, or the Angry Young Men in Great Britian, or Darling (Julie Christie). It is not only a mirror back into the 60's or early 70's, but a mirror of our recent history. And as with all mirrors, the image is not usually pretty. L'Avventura did interesting things with mirrors, too. Of course even the Elizabethans were hung up on that.

The more things change . . .

Grapeshot