A social debutante (Lea Massari) goes yachting on the Mediterranean with her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and a friend (Monica Vitti) and disappears without a trace during a brief island stop. Almost immediately, the two remaining party members forget their crucial task and begin a physical relationship. Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avenntura (Italian for The Adventure, and kind of a backhanded joke for literal minded movie seekers by title) shook up the film world upon its initial release, enthralling and perplexing half of movie audiences while putting the other half to sleep. This is the epitome of a difficult film. It took two long viewings and some further readings for me to even scrape its surface and gain a tenuous grip on it and still, in the end, I was left feeling as ambivalent about the picture as its vacuous characters.
