MovieChat Forums > L'avventura (1961) Discussion > This is not a mystery movie, right?

This is not a mystery movie, right?


I do not think I was just seeing things. The movie is all dramatic irony or whatnot. The brunette is dead in the rocks. You see her washed up corpse. The movie is really about her ex-lover and cousin/friend slowly realizing and accepting that one plain day, a person they loved wandered off, died, and will never be in their lives again. The audience knows it right away, because the camera pulls away from the searching Vitti, to over a ledge, where you see a watery corpse in the rocks. Right? I re-wound it and showed my brother, he agreed with me. I found a review on netflix saying the same thing. I thought I'd find the same here on IMDB, but surprising the threads are all about other non-sense.

The reason the Vitti is comforting Sandro after finding him with the prostitute is because they are both suddenly accepting reality and realizing they are being idiots in trying to deny and distract themselves from their loss. that he was cheating on her is really small potatoes.

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I remember seeing a scene where I thought it looked like it could be a corpse but I thought it was just an illusion. Just to be sure were talking about the same spot in the movie, at what time in the movie does this happen?

I always thought that we where to believe that she boarded the other boat in the area that they catch a glimpse of leaving when they start looking. She got bored with things and was tired of her situation and was irrational so she just left. I could be wrong though. I think this was also the stance Roger Ebert took.

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I just saw this movie and I paid attention trying to catch this scene you wrote about, but I didn't see any scene with a corpse. I think Antonioni hasn't given us any clues. This movie is beyond ambiguity, it's in the realm of indefinition.

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

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The OP's "analysis" sounds like the work of a teenager. One who wants everything to be literal and wrapped up with a nice big bow (or corpse, as the case may be).

The reason no one has ever brought this up on IMDB is because it's an asinine way to approach the film, even though it has only the tiniest grain of truth to it (namely the part about the leads accepting that "the brunette" LOL is dead, but even that's a small piece of the larger film, and frankly it's never resolved as simplistically as the OP seems desperate to think). Everything else the OP posited is only the most superficial analysis one could apply to the film!

Furthermore, THERE IS NO CORPSE ON THE ROCKS. That's why no one else has ever brought it up, except at Netflix, that temple of reliable film criticism. :D

Watch more carefully next time and in one of the long shots of the craggy islands, you'll easily spot a small row boat drifting out to see, almost on the horizon of the shot. Antonio put it there on purpose, to establish the likelihood that Anna simply LEFT the life she was living behind. When you see this boat, you WON'T see anyone sitting in it, but that doesn't preclude the possibility that Anna may have been laying down, uncaring where the tides might take her. All of this is intentional on the part of the director, who definitely DID NOT include any shots of corpses to give easy answers to the mouth-breathers in the audience. ;-)

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Yup, as others have been saying - no corpse and no educated guesses to make; there´s a reason that Antonioni reportedly refused to even speculate on the issue. She vanishes and suddenly the film changes into something else completely - there´re few movies that are so low on any kind of ´action´ and yet manage to play out over the course of about 1,5 hours which such precision, each scene and shot utilized to maximum, mostly disquieting, effect.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

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hey! people replied to this. well i have only seen this once, and it was whenever i made the first post. apparently i need to watch it again. anyway, it's not so much that i am sure i saw a corpse, as that i felt like the camera moved in a funny and intentional way. and that during the movement, maybe i could see a corpse-like splotch in the rocks. then i wrote it like i was positive, because why not.

thanks for correcting me, Coolmovies. i would have hated to have accidently shared my theory with anyone else and sounded superficial. when i saw how high-brow the film was in tone, i should have known it could not contain a complete, literal story. because that siht's for teenagers. "LOL"

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your irony is so low key that it's as ambiguous as this movie. nicely done ;)

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Well done.

"Wow. Our town has only had a Whole Foods for three weeks and we already have our first gay kids."

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