Opiniões dos críticos

It's been called alienating, but I'm not sure I agree. Alienation is certainly one of its themes, but as a movie — especially seen on a big screen — it's hypnotic. Antonioni was searching for a new way into the world of the film — one focused on landscape, architecture, gestures and movements. So he pulls you in with those striking compositions, his graceful camera movements, and his attention to sound. And, of course, with his attention to the human face, particularly Vitti's.

Antonioni's audacious camera placements (like this divided final composition) cut off or conceal part of the setting, obscure part of a body or a face, or deny the audience the object of a character's attention. . . And as the characters roam in and around various places, Antonioni's acute attention to detail puts forth so much in the interior spaces as well as the exterior locales that one contemplates without any clarification their presumed, but by no means obvious, significance.

Though it keeps a cool emotional register, the film is nonetheless revolutionary for its refusal to engage in the conventions expected of it. Bosley Crowther had it right that Antonioni was dealing only with what interested him, but he couldn't quite come around to the thought that that's what a great artist does, however much it cuts against the grain. World cinema eventually caught up to L'Avventura, but for a time, it had the rest of cinema choking on its dust.

L'Avventura is a disappearing act, but what vanishes isn't only a woman, but all of the cultural baggage entailed, with the filmmaker providing a proto-feminist, male-helmed screed of self-indictment, soon to be taken up in spirit by Ingmar Bergman with Persona, and perfected decades later by David Lynch in Mulholland Drive. Antonioni seeks to implode any clear dividing line between social place and the subjects addressed by them.

Vitti, with her placid face and narrow eyes, gives the character a far-off stare. She seems to see through everything—not to the other side, not to any solid ground, but at least past the surface. She doesn't just anchor the film. She embodies it, right through to her final act, a gesture so graceful and cathartic it recalls Ozu. Manny Farber, among others, criticized Antonioni's aloofness, but L'Avventura is no statue. The narrative remains defiant, but the humanity is overwhelming.

It's difficult to think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way that people are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hear . . . I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, it's one of the great works of cinema.

...L'Avventura is full of young, youthful, warm-blooded people stuck in sterile and inhospitable landscapes. It's just that there's something inside these people—some desire or need or capacity—that the world beyond them doesn't account for; or, more radically, that there's some absence inside the people themselves for which their barren surroundings are just a convenient mirror or a visual corollary.

Always fusing neo-realism with science-fiction, Antonioni's world is one of superfices and emotions hardening into titanium; communication is a set of enormous church bells connected across wide distances by flimsy ropes, remembrances are just a name for money tossed at a prostitute's feet.

It's the journalist's contact that propels Claudia and Sandro on the next leg of their search—and that contact makes the movie burst into a second cinematic life a full hour and a half into the action, gives Antonioni a moment in which he discovers a new style that orients the rest of the movie, and, for that matter, the rest of his career.

Through his then-groundbreaking usage of negative space and his compositional de-emphasizing of the individual in favor of indifferent landscapes (a tactic recalling Giorgio de Chirico), Antonioni created, as the Cannes jury put it in 1960, a new language of cinema, one that perfectly expressed a modern alienation that's as enduring as the film.

One of L'avventura's many remarkable qualities to note now is its staying power – its ability to astonish anew after repeated viewings . . . What makes L'avventura the greatest of all films, however, is its assertion, exploration and expansion of the concept of the ‘open film'. This had been Antonioni's great project ever since he started out as a filmmaker after an extremely interesting career as a critic (like Godard).

Though once compared to Psycho, made the same year and also about a couple searching for a woman who mysteriously disappears after featuring heavily in the opening reel, Antonioni's film could not be more dissimilar in tone and effect... If it once seemed the ultimate in arty, intellectually chic movie-making, the film now looks all too studied and remote a portrait of emotional sterility.