Agroup of rich Italians is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number—a moody, unhappy young woman—disappears. Murder, kidnapping, accident, suicide? Her boyfriend and her close friend search for her, but the search turns into a new love story, and the mystery is never resolved.

With this simple, elusive tale, director Michelangelo Antonioni launched himself to the forefront of the emerging European art cinema. At the time ofL’avventura’s premiere at Cannes, in May 1960, he was forty-six and had directed five previous features, all of them interesting but none of them able to massively capture the public’s attention. The premiere was a disaster, with catcalls erupting throughout the auditorium. But the critics loved it, and so—when it went into international release—did wider audiences. WithL’avventura, Antonioni’s career was made, and the film is now an acknowledged classic.

Forty years ago, the film struck audiences mainly with its freshness, and it can still have that effect today. It surprises with its insights: characters do unexpected things in unexpected places, but in a way that provokes recognition—yes, that does happen, though it doesn’t conform to the way we think things ought to happen.

At the beginning of the film, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and his girlfriend, Anna (Lea Massari), have an uneasy relationship. They have been apart for a while, and getting together again they feel like strangers. When the yacht stops at a deserted volcanic island, Anna goes for a walk and doesn’t come back. The rest of the film hinges on the search for this woman who has mysteriously disappeared.

In fact, only two members of the cruise party pursue the search with any conviction: Sandro and Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti). The search is complicated when Sandro becomes distracted from it and turns his attentions to Claudia. His inconstancy is not explained. There is little psychologizing, and certainly no moralizing. After much hesitation, Claudia returns his affection, and the two fall in love.

From the moment that Sandro’s pursuit of Claudia is suddenly converted into mutual passion, the film’s momentum changes. Anna recedes into the back- ground, but her absence continues to haunt the narrative, right until the very end. This absence—which is also a presence—is a key to the film. It inevitably brings to mind Hitchcock, who plays with a similar motif inRebecca (1940) andVertigo (1958), and also dispatches his heroine early in a film exactly contemporary withL’avventura—Psycho. (Antonioni would later develop another Hitchcock theme, that of the wrong man, in The Passenger in 1975.)

In other respects, however, Antonioni and Hitchcock can be seen as opposites. InL’avventura,events just happen; nothing signals them as significant. Anna does not actively disappear, she is just no longer on-screen, and neither the audience nor the other characters are aware of her not being present. Tension is generally slack, and when it does build, it does so obscurely, brought to life more by a surrounding uncertainty than by careful preparation and accelerating rhythms. Above all, chance is chance, and no inexorable train of events is ever set in motion.

WhatL’avventura showed was that films do not have to be structured around major events, that very little drama can happen and a film can still be fascinating to its audience. It also showed—and this was harder for viewers to grasp—that events in films do not have to be, in an obvious way, meaningful.L’avventura presents its characters behaving according to motivations as unclear to themselves as to the audience; they are sensitive to mood, to landscape, to things that happen, but they also behave in routine and conformist ways. None of them, except Claudia (who had, in her words, “a sensible childhood . . . without any money”), seem to have much consciousness of the lack of direction that afflicts them. They are, to use a word very fashionable at the time the film came out, alienated. But to say, as many critics did, that the film is “about” alienation is to miss the point. The film shows; it doesn’t argue. It convinces by the sensitivity and accuracy of its observation, not by heavy signals to the audience to think this, that, or the other.

More than any other film,L’avventura seems to define the spirit of a time in cinema when anything seemed possible and there was no territory into which it could not venture. Above all, what it seeks to capture is the world of fleeting emotion, feelings that are unstable and crystallize only momentarily in the camera’s gaze. AfterL’avventura,Antonioni did not look back. He made three more films with Vitti—La notte(1961), L’eclisse(1962), andRed Desert(1964)— each time pushing further the frontiers of what cinema could explore. It is hard to say which of these films is the best. ButL’avventura is the one that started Antonioni on his quest, and remains the one that most clearly represents the unique nature of his art.

 This piece originally appeared in the Criterion Collection’s 2001 DVD edition of L’avventura.