Trailer
Plot summary
Anna sets out from Rome with her lover Sandro and her friend Claudia for a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, joining two wealthy couples aboard. Anna's father, whom she visits before leaving, senses that her relationship with Sandro is going badly, and their reunion is distant. On the desolate volcanic island where the group anchors, Anna jumps into the sea and tells Sandro she has seen a shark; he follows her and later learns it was untrue. She complains that his long business trips keep them apart, and he dismisses her and sleeps on the rocks. When the party prepares to leave, Anna has vanished. The group combs the island, and Sandro, Claudia and Corrado stay behind while the others call the authorities. Claudia suggests his neglect may have played some part, which offends him.
Cast
- James Addamsas Corrado
- Dorothy De Polioloas Gloria Perkins
- Enrico Bologna
- Franco Cimino
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about L'Avventura (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- One week after shooting began, the production company went bankrupt and the cast and crew kept working for free until new funding arrived. Ships stopped reaching Lisca Bianca, leaving them stranded three days without food or blankets, and the crew struck, so Antonioni and his assistant director shot the film themselves.
- While filming the Mediterranean scenes, actress Lea Massari developed a cardiac condition after days of swimming in the cold sea and was rushed to Rome, where she spent several days in a coma.
- At the film's 1960 Cannes premiere, laughs broke out from the opening titles and continued through the screening, joined by boos; Antonioni and Vitti, who said she was sobbing, fled the theater.
- The day after its premiere, the filmmakers were sent a list of signatures from established filmmakers and writers who declared L'Avventura the best film screened at Cannes, and after a second screening it won the Jury Prize.
SPOILER
Antonioni told Alain Robbe-Grillet that a scene showing Anna's body recovered from the sea was scripted and actually filmed but left out of the final cut, apparently for timing reasons.- Giovanni Fusco, who had scored all of Antonioni's films up to that time, was asked by Antonioni to compose "jazz as though it had been written in the Hellenic era".
- The sequence where Sandro and Claudia visit a deserted town was shot at Santa Panagia near Catania, in buildings commissioned by Benito Mussolini as examples of fascist architecture of the Mezzogiorno.
