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L'avventura (1960)
"Everything is becoming so hideously simple." So is the thesis of this great adventure as poetically stated by Claudia, a character who begins to see her life recycle itself and leave her behind. The theme here isn't so much love or the difference between the sexes, but how tremendously compulsive it is to be a human being, especially one masked by the absurd complications of bourgeoisie tradition. The film is shot beautifully and has a fittingly beautiful cast. It's headliners: the charming Gabriele Ferzetti and the magnetic Monica Vetti, a woman so radiant and confident she absorbs her surroundings effortlessly and remains always the most pressing point of interest, even among grandiose architecture and island landscapes. Antonioni carefully introduces her late in the film, and slides her forward at a moment where we are preoccupied by a plot point so strange it seems cut from a surrealist piece yet so natural it seems out of a newsreel. This jarring tragedy which introduces the film becomes a ghost to haunt the remainder of it, and the following incidents are clearly part of life's confounding randomness. There is no scientific support for the turns life takes- death has no schedule, love has no reason. A work of art like Antonioni's presents the best way to look at things; it supplies no answers to the infinite amount of puzzling questions presented in its reels, but by the touching conclusion we must realize that in a world like this, answers don't matter. We realize that next to bigger things like volcanoes and city structures, our time here is not so long and not so affecting- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't embrace it.
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