L'Avventura
Short description
L'Avventura follows a group of wealthy Romans on a boating excursion among the rocky Sicilian islands. After an argument with her lover Sandro, an architect, Anna disappears from the semi-deserted island where the party has spent the day. Sandro and Anna's friend Claudia stay behind to search for her, and as the search drags on, the two begin a romance shadowed by guilt and unease.
Michelangelo Antonioni directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Tonino Guerra and Elio Bartolini. Released in 1960, it is the fourth of the thirteen films he directed, coming after Il Grido and before La Notte. Monica Vitti plays Claudia, Gabriele Ferzetti is Sandro and Lea Massari is Anna, with Dominique Blanchar, Renzo Ricci and James Addams in supporting roles. The film runs 144 minutes.
The response is strong. Ratings are high across the board: on IMDb it holds 7.7/10 from around 37,000 votes, on TMDB 7.5/10 from 771 votes, and critics gave it 9.3/10 from 52 reviews, a notably warmer reception than the audience scores. The film is regarded as a landmark of international cinema for its unconventional visual language, which largely dispenses with continuous plot, and it emerged during the period of Italian Neorealism.
What's left behind the scenes
- This is director Andrei Zvyagintsev's favorite film.
- At the premiere at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the film was so heavily booed that the director and screenwriter Michelangelo Antonioni and the actress Monica Vitti, who played Claudia, were forced to literally flee the theater. Everything changed with the second screening. Afterwards, the film received a special jury prize and came to be considered one of the pinnacles of European cinema.
- During the premiere screening of the film in Cannes, the scene in which Monica Vitti's character runs down a hotel corridor searching for Sandro (played by Gabriele Ferzetti) particularly displeased the audience. The scene was very long, and during its showing, the audience repeatedly shouted 'Cut!'
- During filming, Lea Massari, who played the role of Anna, suffered a heart attack and remained in a coma for two days. In the scene of Anna jumping off the yacht, Franco Indovina, the assistant director, wearing a women's swimsuit, stood in for her, while Massari was in the hospital at the time.
- Filming for the first part of the movie took place on the small island of Liska Bianca, which had neither running water nor electricity, but did have strong winds that once escalated into a hurricane. At one point, the filmmakers were simply stranded on the island.
- The rented yacht, on which the main characters were vacationing, had to be returned to its owner at one point (who raised a fuss about the delay in rental payment). To continue filming, Antonioni found another yacht, but it turned out to be somewhat larger, which is noticeable in some shots.
- The company that sponsored the film went bankrupt during production.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
