L’Avventura
September 8th, 2007
Granted, I came to this movie from a radically different angle from the crowd who first saw and booed it at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, but in retrospect, it takes some effort to understand their confusion and upset. Yes, L’Avventura isn’t The Bourne Ultimatum, pacing and plotting are leisurely and oblique, but the film isn’t anywhere near as forbidding as contemporary audiences seemed to think or Camille Paglia recently suggested.
Far from being non-narrative or dull, L’Avventura is loaded with tension. The black and white cinematography is gorgeous and deliberate, and even on the surface, the mystery of Anna (Lea Massari), who disappears on a cruise to a volcanic island, is intriguing. The questionable relationship that develops between Anna’s caddish fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) is ripe with complex undercurrents of desire, guilt, and despair. And if that’s not enough, you can ponder Antonioni’s masterful play with audience expectations, moral judgments, and narrative/cinematic conventions. If Paglia remembers L’Avventura as “plotless,” what does she make of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Inland Empire?
L’avventura. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960. *****
Mafioso
September 27th, 2006
Presented in a restored print and hailed as a rediscovered masterpiece of black comedy, Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 Mafiosio tells the story of a Sicilian who returns to his village after having made good up north. Played by Alberto Sordi (The White Sheik, I Vitelloni), the poor man and his Milanese wife and children have to face many fish-out-of-water jokes involving Sicilian food, marital beds in the center of the living room, and hairy sisters, before his past catches up with him in the shape of the local Don. Despite the film’s winning tone and a fine comic performance by Sordi, I’ll confess to being underwhelmed by both the humor and the plot, which plays out just as expected.
Mafioso. Alberto Lattuada, 1962. **
[tags]film, 2 stars, italy, sicily, mafia, black comedy[/tags]
