The Sickness Unto Death

L'Avventura (Cino del Duca; Janus), made in Italy by a respected but little-known moviemaker named Michelangelo Antonioni, is a nightmarish masterpiece of tedium, a parable of spiritual purgation, a myth for the Anxious Age.

Part One of the three confluent but contrasting parts of L'Avventura (The Adventure) is set on one of the Aeolian Isles, crests of a vast sunken crater in the Mediterranean. By placing his characters in this dead volcano. Antonioni clearly intends to suggest that they are spiritually extinct. The walking dead are idle-rich Italians, members of a yachting party, who lie sunning like lizards on the lava shelves. Anna (Lea Massari), the vivid brunette, is a restless little disperata who finds her life empty and is sick of filling it with sex. Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna's handsome lover, is a successful architect in his early 405 who can't imagine why anything more than sex is necessary--except of course money. Claudia (Monica Vitti), Anna's girl friend, seems to be just another blonde.

Suddenly a storm comes up. The party has to leave the island. Where is Anna? They call. She does not answer. They ransack the island. She has vanished. Is she dead? Did she run away? The yacht heads back to port, leaving Sandro and Claudia to continue the search.

Part Two, says Antonioni, "seems to describe how a person is searched for. but it really describes how she is forgotten." Anxious, guilty, deeply unsettled and finally exhausted. Sandro looks to Claudia for--comfort? oblivion? sex? It's all the same to Sandro. He is one of those men who, at the least sign of strain or difficulty, reach for a woman the way other men reach for a cigarette. Claudia resists, but when the search takes Sandro to the mainland, she goes along, and the inevitable happens. At first they prosecute the search with determination, but as they become more and more absorbed in their own love affair, they do less and less about Anna. Claudia is the first to face the truth: "At first I was afraid that Anna was dead. Now I'm afraid she is alive."

Part Three moves slowly, relentlessly, as a bulldozer might move an Everest of farina, into the character of Sandro. What is wrong with him? He only knows that he has sold his creative talent for commercial success. On and on and on he goes, looking but not really looking for Anna, avoiding the truth about himself, escaping into sex with Claudia as once he had escaped with Anna and the devil knows how many others; a man turning eternally in the limbo of a living death--and apparently enjoying it. Suddenly it occurs to the spectator that Anna will never be found, that Claudia's love affair will never work out. that Sandro will never amount to anything, that in fact nothing of any importance or interest is going to happen in this interminable (2 hr. 25 min.) picture.

When the boredom becomes intolerable, Antonioni has made his point: this, underneath the playboy pleasantries, is how it really feels to be Sandro. Suddenly the tension snaps. Finding himself alone one night. Sandro falls helplessly into the arms of the nearest willing woman. There Claudia finds him. In her eyes he sees himself for the first time as he really is. Later, in a moment of extraordinary beauty and profundity of feeling, she wordlessly forgives him while he wordlessly weeps. Together they look silently into the far distance, toward the snowy summit of Mount Etna, a live volcano.

This strange tale is the work of a master cinemechanic who at the same time is a gifted writer, a subtle moralist, and a plastic artist of unusually clear and single vision. In this vision the script (which he wrote himself), the actors who play it, the rooms and landscapes all move and blend without seam. And thanks to Cameraman Aldo Scavardi, all are drowned in a silvery continuum of light that suggests a world not now, not then, but timeless. The sense of timelessness is further enforced by a pace so slow that sometimes the picture almost seems to back up, and by the peculiar indirect way in which the story is not so much told as accumulated. "The picture develops like a mosaic," says Antonioni. ''Not until the last piece is in place can you see what the whole thing is about."

What is it about? Sandro is a man cursed with what Kierkegaard called "the sickness unto death, which is despair." Like millions of others, he has lost God and his own soul and doesn't even know it. Claudia, a symbol for his soul, leads him back to the source of life. Antonioni is clearly reminding the world, in an image quite as sublime as Goethe's, that in this troubled age as in any other it is not man who saves his soul, but the soul that saves man, that only "the Eternal Feminine leads us to the skies." Perhaps Sandro was not such a fool after all.

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