One Paragraph Movie Review: L’Avventura

Two hundred and ninety-ninth film: L’Avventura, an Antonioni film from 1960 that starts like Gilligan’s Island and ends like hangover regret. This story that has as its main premise a girl who disappears on a short cruise isn’t, amazingly, about a girl who disappears. It’s about how love is awful and brief and people just imagine they feel it because they’re bored. Fun! The disappeared girl’s fiancé and best friend get a bit sick of looking for her and have sex with each other instead, pausing intermittently to hate themselves and wear nice clothes. Honestly, that’s it, that’s what happens. It gives you the sense of hopelessness that its characters are constantly experiencing, but is only as successful at evoking sympathy as anything else that’s about how rich people sometimes feel sad. Another movie saved by mid-century frocks, and the first one I’ve seen saved by Monica Vitti’s face. It’s a good face. Two plot-irrelevant water cyclones out of five.