SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
Antonioni’s are not uniformly arresting films. But they are invaluable for the central question they raise.
His camera would rest its wise eye upon a scene for minutes on end, watching it unfold without judgment or impatience.
All fiction is cast in the form of a quest, whether it is to rescue an abducted wife, to sail home to Ithaca, or even to simply wait, endlessly, for a funnily-named character who never shows up. The quest is the keystone; it is the journey that determines the fabric of the fiction as it ripples and settles into being. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, however, matters are a little more nebulous. The quest itself is uncertain, and Antonioni’s characters will navigate through his movies almost in Brownian motion, buffeted by circumstance and propelled by instincts that they can only murkily understand.
Archetype film
“The Passenger,” his Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in 1975, is an Antonioni archetype. David Locke, Jack Nicholson’s disillusioned reporter, switches identities with a dead man in his hotel and then spends the remainder of the film escaping his past. Apart from a nagging prickle of anomie that Antonioni builds masterfully, we see no reason for Locke to effect the switch. Why does he do it? What was he hoping for? What, in short, is his quest? Locke himself can provide no answers; he is, after all, just the passenger.
Antonioni had his signature methods of posing these questions and, to perhaps his most lasting credit, only infrequently did those methods seem pretentious or opaque. In “The Passenger,” as in most of his other films, Antonioni occupied the vantage position of a particularly still observer. His camera would, true to his Neo-realist roots, rest its wise eye upon a scene for minutes on end, watching it unfold without judgement or impatience. His soundtrack would be sparse, populated mostly with silence, occasionally with natural sound, and sometimes with a background score that was no less beautiful for its unobtrusiveness. And in that stillness his characters would drift, like corks on calm water, moving slowly but very perceptibly.
Earlier version
“The Passenger’s” simmering aimlessness emerged earlier, in 1957’s “Il Grido,” or “The Cry.” Aldo, a swarthier, less cocky version of Locke, wanders away from his life, forced to give up the woman he loves and choosing to give up his work and his daughter. As with Locke, Aldo finds it to be a tougher task than he imagined; he cannot shed his own nature, and that nature drives him into a spiral of uncontrollable self-destruction.
It may be blasphemy to say so, but “Il Grido” and “The Passenger” are both far more touching, powerful films than Antonioni’s most acclaimed film, “L’Avventura”. Famously, “L’Avventura” was loudly jeered by the audience at Cannes in 1960, even as it was equally loudly applauded by the jury, which awarded it a Special Prize. The audience’s confusion isn’t difficult to understand. “L’Avventura,” or “The Adventure,” is possibly the second most misleading title in cinematic history, right behind “A Clockwork Orange”, which features neither Swiss timepieces nor citrus fruit.
Aimless lives
“L’Avventura” purports, for its first third, to concern itself with the quest — that word again — to find Anna, who mysteriously disappears on an Aeolian island. Even Anna’s boyfriend Sandro and her best friend Claudia think that is their objective, until they are hopelessly sidetracked by their own hasty romance. Anna’s other friends do no better, shrugging off the loss to dive right back into their pools of thoughtless hedonism.
As a critique of the lifestyles of the idle rich, “L’Avventura” isn’t in quite the same bracket as Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game”. Renoir is more biting in his satire, and his sucker punch in the final round is a real haymaker. But the lethargic aimlessness of “L’Avventura” is, on reflection, a mirror of the lethargic aimlessness of its subjects. If it is difficult to get involved even remotely with his characters, Antonioni seems to suggest, perhaps it is because they are themselves so uninvolved in life.
There is no doubt that “L’Avventura” creaks and buckles significantly in its two and a half hours, and that virus infects virtually the entire Antonioni canon. There are no bones to be made about it; Antonioni’s are not uniformly arresting films. But they are invaluable for the central question they raise: What is the quest? We can only answer that question for ourselves, and Antonioni knew that. “I want the audience to work,” he told a New York Times reporter after the release of “L’Avventura.” To our passively entertained senses today, that concept sounds horrendously unfamiliar and repulsive, and that, ironically enough, may actually make Antonioni’s cinema more relevant now than it was in his own time.