Rosa von Praunheim | Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I Am My Own Woman) / 1992

surviving murderous times

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentin Passoni (screenplay), Rosa von Praunheim (director) Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I Am My Own Woman) / 1992

 

The important LGBTQ director Rosa von Praunheim’s 1992 film I Am My Own Woman is a study in remarkable transsexual transgression and almost unimaginable acceptance by some in a society that was so restrictive that one might have presumed that anyone like the central character of this film would never have survived.

 

     Growing up in Nazi Germany, the young boy Lothar Berfelde, who even as a child began to collect objects, was first hired by second-hand dealer Max Bier in 1942 as they began to collect objects from the Jews left behind as they were being sent away to the camps. But even then, as objects flew out of windows when the Nazis raided Jewish homes, Lothar felt a sense of outrage for people being treated in such a manner, Max demanding that he remain quiet for fear they too might be sent away off.

      Meanwhile, the violence in his own home, his father nightly threatening his mother, resulted in a sense of fear as great as that he felt on the streets. When he attempted to intervene in his mother’s beatings, he himself was threatened by his swinish father, who seemed to represent the era’s general behavior, very similar to that of Franz Biberkopf’s Weimer Republic actions in Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a period in which he killed his own wife.

      But suddenly, in a brilliant maneuver, director von Praunheim interrupts the actions of his central figure Jens Taschner, playing Lothar, with the real figure, the elderly Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, entering the room to tell Taschner that he played the action perfectly, “just as it really happened.” And we realize that we are not experiencing a fictionalized portrait of the film’s central figure, but a real documentary that is focused on the actual character and that it will never go far off course from the truth of the factual narrative, something quite reassuring given the numerous bio-pics that have come before it. I Am My Own Wife, we realize, will not be a sensationalist recreation of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s life, but a testament to the figure herself. 

      Lothar, we soon are told is a transsexual, a man who prefers dressing as a woman, but still identifies as a male, not a transgender being. And that difference is important throughout as he/she negotiates the world as a gay man who dresses as a woman in Nazi and later society which has no place for either of those identities. I shall describe Lothar/Charlotte hereafter as “she,” despite the fact that speaking as Lothar he insists that although he is a feminine being in a masculine body, he is still cis gender, comfortable in with his male sexual organs. His compulsion is to dress as a woman, not necessarily to sexually become one, or as the title expresses it, “I am my own woman,” a special being who defines herself as a woman with male sexual desires.

        Only her father, she answers the boy’s question about her family members relationship to the Nazi Party, was a National Socialist. “He was very militant, moody, and brutal; you can almost say he was a madman.” On the other hand, she declares, her granduncle was a gracious being who warned her of the animalistic nature of the “brown-shirted criminals.” He died in July 1942, in the midst of the action we have just witnessed. Now, she explains, they were under her father’s mercy.

      During school break she was sent away to her Aunt Luise’s estate in East Prussia. We witness actor Taschner fitting himself into a corset as the young Lothar, putting on one of his aunt’s dresses. In the background, Luise enters, asking the boy if he enjoys dressing in that manner. When he answers yes, she helps him put on his necklace. This is clearly a world that accepts what the society in general rejects.

        Luise claims she has been watching him and realizes that nature has played on joke on them: “You should have been a woman, and I a man.” She permits the boy to wear her dresses in the house, but outside warns her to be careful.

        She also hands her a copy of a book from Weimar era by the famed Magnus Hirschfeld, The Transvestites, giving the young Lothar an advantage that hardly any young German child of the day was allowed.

        Seeing the young Lothar dressed as a female climbing the stairs of the bar to the hayloft, the farm’s young worker, Christian, follows the boy up, the engaging in sex. When Luise enters demanding her horse be saddled, she discovers the two together, apologizing to them for interrupting the idyll, and telling them to take their time finishing what they're about.

     Luise is the absolutely perfect match to young nephew, herself lived out her lesbianism in “murderous times” as well as living openly as a female transvestite, wearing only male clothing. Her lover, Charlotte Schroppsdorf, was murdered in “the so-called ‘euthanasia program’ of the Nazis.

        But the truly liberating vacation Lothar has in his aunt’s estate ends after the holidays, when he was forced to return to wartime Berlin. In the attic playing with his dolls, his father suddenly enters in Nazi uniform insisting that he will now make a man of his son.

        Charlotte now talks about the only two great forces of good in her life: her mother and her granduncle.” And then there was absolute evil, that was my father who punished and beat me until blood flowed from my nose and mouth.”

       The actor who performs her father asks whether there was ever a moment when she was to him? Her answer is a candid “Unfortunately, no point of contact.” She also tells us that after 6 months of marriage to her father, Lothar’s mother demanded a divorce, in response to which “he drew his pistol and aimed at her.” In fact, he shot at her, but Luise intervened, the bullet lodging in the ceiling, the granduncle saving Charlotte’s mother’s life.

        Back into the narrative of this work, Charlotte narrates that her mother used the excuse of the 1943 evacuations from Berlin to take her back to her aunt Luise’s home in East Prussia. When Charlotte’s father returned, his mother announced “that his threats would no longer keep her from a divorce.” Charlotte now knows that “something terrible would happen.” Seeking advice from her aunt, she is told that now that her granduncle is no longer living, the child must become his mother’s protector.

         Sent back to Berlin, and now alone with her father, he demanded that the boy choose between him or his mother. And when his father takes up his gun and slams the cartridge shut, Lothar knows what his future may be if he insists upon returning to his mother.”There’s only one decision,” declares the father. “You have one night to think it over. Otherwise I’ll shoot them all, and I’ll beat you to death like a mangy dog.”

         The future Charlotte, as still young boy, takes up a large “stirring stick,” “crept into my father’s room before dawn, and struck,” beating him to death. In 1944 he was sent to Tübingen for a psychiatric examination by “Doctor Ritter,” asking him if his father had approached his sexually. The child answered “No.” Asked if he has had sexual intercourse, Lothar appears not understand what the question means, despite the fact that we have already seen the boy and Christian engaged in sex. But the next question says it all, “Why haven’t you joined the Hitler Youth?” If his amazingly brave answer, “Because it doesn’t interest me,” hasn’t yet convinced you at 17 ½ minutes into this hour and ½ film that what you are seeing is a startling insight into LGBTQ German history, then you simply don’t serve von Praunheim’s startlingly revelatory revelation of gay history. And you should turn it off and put on a nice heterosexual rom-com.

         Lothar is imprisoned, but the defeat of Germany during the Allied invasion sets him free to wander the Berlin streets, now just escaping be shot as a German deserter by remaining Nazi soldiers.

        By 1946, Lothar, finally identifying himself as a feminine being living in a man’s body, takes on the name of Carlotte von Mahlsdorf, the name Charlotte being a German parallel to Lottchen of Lothar, and perhaps a testament to his aunt’s lover, and Mahlsdorf referring to the section of Berlin where she now lives. Her character is now performed by Ichgola Androgyn.

        Charlotte returns to the mostly destroyed Friedrishfelde castle and spends hard years, working with others in attempting to restore it. But still being perceived still as an outsider in her own culture, she is removed from the property by East German authorities.

         Charlotte has no choice but to now enter work as a domestic, beginning a job in the household of Herbert von Zitzenau (Robert Dietl) a former equestrian officer. He soon seduces her and the two begin a secret relationship, the affair surviving a number of years until his death.

 

        Although life in East Germany is terribly difficult for LGBTQ men and women, many of them such as Charlotte discover ways around the restrictive social order. Cruising a public restroom, Charlotte meets up with man named Joechen, who quickly because her male lover, with who she develops a sadomasochistic role-playing relationship that lasts for 27 years until Joechen’s death.

         Despite all the forces against her, Charlotte survives as an open transvestite in East Germany for 30 years, working to preserve the contents of East Berlin’s first and, for a long while, its only gay bar after the DDR government closed it down and demolished the building it which it had existed. Eventually those contents are transferred to the Gründerzeit Museum in Mahlsdorf, managed by Charlotte and a lesbian couple.

         Charlotte even plays a figure in the first East German gay film, Coming Out by Heiner Carow, a film I also review.

 

        If one might have thought that the fall of Berlin Wall and the joining of the reunification meant better times for Charlotte Mahlsdorf, you haven’t dealt with the realities of a new government that was still not totally friendly with gay issues, and certainly had no conception of gay life in East Berlin. The German government now takes over the objects and management of Gründerzeit Museum and she and gay friends she has invited for a celebratory LGBT day, the first East-West gay and lesbian gathering, are attacked by neo-Nazi punks.

         Finally in 1992 Mahlsdorf incredible life and her endless activities is awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit from the government for furthering the cause of sexual freedom.

         But far more importantly, I would argue, was Rosa von Praunheim’s film of the same year. The very fact that she, herself, is featured and is permitted interchange with artists depicting her, gives a depth and significance to this documentary work to which most such films cannot possibly make claim.

       If in some senses it reminds me of the amazing documentaries of Albert and David Mayles, particularly of Grey Gardens (1975), one quickly perceives that whereas the characters in that film are basically eccentric freaks, Mahlsdorf, despite living as a transvestite in a world that surely perceived such a sexual difference as freakish and unacceptable, was a far more significant being whose sense of self-worth and pride kept her functioning at full level while the worlds around her fell apart. She is not just a survivor, a figure whose eccentricities allowed her a small space left in a world that had forgotten her existence like Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, but recognizing early in her life as a different but absolutely normal sexual being Charlotte Mahlsdorf demanded her rights from the horrific world into which she was born, and this film demonstrates, and fought against that world with everything she was capable of, refusing to give into its prejudices and hates, standing as a basically unknown hero for decades for LGBTQ rights.

       We need such films desperately to understand our history, and Germany needs them perhaps even more to help heal its own transgressions of all differences, sexual, religious, artistic, and political.

       And finally, such a figure as Mahlsdorf tells us, once again, that faced always with future abnormalities of political culture, that no matter how those who gain power might struggle to reiterate a bland normative notion of human life and its sexual, social, and sacred activities, they can never fully succeed.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2024).

Alfred Hitchcock | Torn Curtain / 1966

under cover

by Douglas Messerli

Brian Moore (screenplay, revised by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Torn Curtain / 1966

It is difficult to ascertain why Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain is not a great movie. Clearly it is not as tightly written nor as clever or sardonic as Rear Window or North by Northwest. Both Universal Studios and Hitchcock were generally displeased with Brian Moore’s original screenplay, which they saw as too dour, and called in the writing team of Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse to fix it. So too was Hitchcock displeased with the original score by his trusted composer, Bernard Herrmann, and called for a new score by John Addison. Addison’s music, with its driving, pulsing force, is quite satisfactory, if not as broodily romantic as Herrmann’s previous contributions.

      Because of actor Julie Andrew’s busy schedule, Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film at a much faster pace than he wanted. Perhaps more time would have taken some of the kinks out of the movie. But it is also clear that throughout the shooting the director had become somewhat disinterested.

     The major problem seems to stem from the presence of its two leading stars, Paul Newman and Andrews, foisted upon Hitchcock by the studio Although both actors had done brilliant films—Andrews just coming off of two big money makers, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, and Newman having just recently done significant work in The Hustler and Hud—they were clearly not the right kind of players for Hitchcock’s hands-off methods, and together they create little of the electricity needed to convince us that Andrews’ Sarah Sherman would give up her American citizenship to follow Newman’s Professor Michael Armstrong into East Germany. Newman’s need, as a method actor, to constantly be told of his motivations reportedly received Hitchcock’s sarcastic response, “the motivation is your salary.” While usually following every move of his female heroines with the loving lens of his camera, Hitchcock basically leaves Andrews to her own brittle British prudery. It’s hard to know why she loves Armstrong, and even more difficult to comprehend what Armstrong sees in his handsome, self-sufficient but nearly sexless assistant. Andrews may make a great nanny and governess, but despite her bedroom dalliances early in the film, we doubt she’s much fun in the sack. And despite the handsome exteriors of Hitchcock stars of the past such as Cary Grant and Sean Connery, Hitchcock obviously didn’t know what to do with the simmering cute-boy.

      Hitchcock turned his camera, instead, on his minor actors, eliciting wonderfully eccentric portraits from Lila Kedrova as the Countess Kuchinska, desperate to find an American sponsor to get her out of the country, Tamara Toumanova as the mean and vengeful Ballerina, Wolfgang Kieling as the vernacular-English-spouting Stasi Thug, Hermann Gromek, Ludwig Donath’s exasperated Professor Gustav Lindt, and the nearly speechless Carolyn Conwell as the Farmer’s wife. Despite their star-statuses, Newman and Andrews became mere mannequins surrounded by such fine character actors. For his leads, Hitchcock might as well have used puppets, despite Newman’s and Andrews’ physical attractiveness.

      Beyond these obvious problems, however, there are several absolutely brilliant episodes in the film, certainly better than anything in his previous psychologically hackneyed film Marnie.

       One of the best moments early in the film is the long scene when Armstrong attempts to escape the tracks of Gromek as he enters the Museum zu Berlin (an imaginary museum), Hitchcock’s camera following through the patterned floors with the sound of footsteps following each of Armstrong’s moves. It’s an eerily troubling sequence which demonstrates the real-life experience of what it is like to be followed in a world where there is no possible escape.

      Almost all critics have commented on the long sequence on the farm where Armstrong and the farmer’s wife are forced to kill Gromek when he discovers their involvement with the underground movement π. As Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut, he wanted to show just how difficult it was to kill a man, unlike the James Bond films and similar thrillers. Since they cannot fire a gun without alerting the taxi driver waiting outside, they are forced to use body parts, knives, pans, and, ultimately, gas, to do-in the struggling bull, a scene which plays out like a horrifying and yet comic ballet—shot mostly in silence—rather than the murder which it actually portrays, ending with Armstrong washing the blood from hands. That scene alone ought to justify watching Torn Curtain.

      Yet there are dozens of other scenes almost as exhilarating. Kedrova’s near-mad devouring of the couple as she seeks their help, and her intense cries of “Bitte, Bitte” at post office minions are, once again, both agonizing and funny, creating a kind of intense pathos that reveals her aging desperateness.

      The scene with Armstrong and Lindt, wherein the German physicist is gradually drawn through his pride and intellectual loneliness into a web where he unintentionally betrays his country, all played out against the clock as Armstrong is poised to escape, is absolutely breathtaking.

      So too is the frighteningly funny bus ride through the East German countryside. The bus, owned and operated by the Members of π, and filled by their proponents, is given a special escort of the East German police at the very same moment when the real bus to Berlin catches up with its simulacrum. Here Addison’s jaunty and forward-pulsing music almost matches the naughty-boy mischievousness of his Tom Jones score.

 

     Underneath, under cover so to speak, Torn Curtain, accordingly, contains a whole series of shorts that are well worth watching, even if, by film’s end, we are faced again with only the two dripping, wet leads, who have escaped to Sweden by diving from the East German boat. Although they may live happily ever after, the film has not. But as one critic commented, if Hitchcock had made no other films, we might find Torn Curtain a pretty good work of its day.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April 2014).

Kenji Mizoguchi | 夜の女たち (Yoru no onnatachi) (Women of the Night) / 1948, USA 1979

bad girls

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoshikata Yoda (story, based on the novel by Eijirō Misaita), Kenji Mizoguchi (director) Yoru no onnatachi (Women of the Night) / 1948, USA 1979

 

Kenji Mizoguchi’s powerful post-war film is also somewhat problematic. A woman, Fusako Owada (Kinuyo Tanaka) whose husband has not yet returned from the war, is living, rather uncomfortably, with her tubercular son at her husband’s brother’s home. The brother has little income, and Fusako and her ailing child must often fend for themselves. Attempting to sell one of her summer dresses, Fusako is told by the seemingly friendly clothes-merchant that she should try prostitution, which shocks the struggling woman.

     Back at home, her teenage sister-in-law, Kumiko (Tomie Tsunoda) arrives to report that there is news of Fusako’s husband. Together they rush to his former place of employment, only to discover that, after surviving throughout the war, he has died of malnutrition, leaving behind only a few personal belongings; even his worn uniform has been destroyed. The head of the company, Mr. Kuriyama (Sanae Takasugi) offers his condolences and his help if needed.

      Soon after, Fusako’s child falls into a seizure and dies. Cutting into the future, we see Fusako, now better dressed, on a street where she accidently encounters her long-missing sister, Natsuko, and the two take tea to celebrate their reunion.

     Natsuko, we discover, is working as a “dance hall hostess,” and Fusako is now working as an executive secretary to Mr. Kuriyama. Natusuko asks if she might move in with her sister, and Fusako agrees. After an utterly depressing beginning, accordingly, it now appears that the world has improved for the two sisters. However, as we soon discover, Fusako’s price for her position is the sexual attentions of her boss, who we also discover is smuggling cocaine. While Kuriyama’s is away on business appointment, his assistant rushes into his office to report to Fusako that the police are on their way, entrusting a large cache of the drug to the secretary, who is told to hide it in her home.

      When she arrives home, she discovers her door is locked from inside. When Natsuko finally opens it up, we discover Mr. Kuriyama within; the two have obviously been also having an affair. Furious with the betrayal, Fusako leaves home, disappearing from her sister’s and Kuriyama’s life. Secretly, she has taken the clothes-merchant’s advice and tutelage (the elderly woman also apparently serves as pimp for several women), joining the numerous street-walkers of Osaka.

       If some critics have complained of Mizoguchi’s cuts across space and time in the story I have recounted so far, I would argue that instead of creating confusion, it allows for the inevitable surprises of life itself, and we quickly assimilate these alterations in the condition of his character’s lives. Yet the sudden transformation of Fusako, while perhaps inevitable given the difficulties of her life, seems almost inexplicable. How could a woman horrified of the concept when she was in greater need, suddenly turn to such a way of life? We must wait until later in the film, perhaps, to comprehend a rationale: her utter hate of men, and her desire, after being lied to by Kuriyama, to seek revenge.

 

      When Natsuko discovers that her sister has been spotted on the streets, she goes in search of her, but is mistakenly arrested with numerous other prostitutes in a police round-up. Once the women are booked, they are taken to a prison hospital and tested for syphilis. At the hospital, the two sisters again meet up, Natsuko explaining her mistaken arrest. Although Fusako is now angry with her sister, she remains protective, assuring her that she will be freed and everything will be fine once she proves she has contacted no disease. Shockingly, however, Natsuko discovers that not only is she infected, but that she is pregnant. Yet she quickly becomes determined to have the child and take the cure to rid her of syphilis. When she later explains her condition to Kuriyama, with whom she has been living, he demands she have an abortion and is unsympathetic to her situation. Now also jilted, Natsuko begins to bring home men from her job and to drink heavily.

      In one of the most exciting moments of the film, Fusako, still locked away in the hospital, escapes over the wall, returning to the streets before, finally, returning home to find Natsuko drunk, about to give birth. Fusako demands she join her, lifting up the near-lifeless body, as she takes her to a woman’s refuge. At the refuge, Natsuko goes into labor; the child is stillborn, but she survives. Authorities try to convince both women to change their lives, but Fusako still resists, angrier than ever and now a hard-boiled street creature.

      A similar situation has previously occurred with her young sister-in-law, Kumiko, who, having run away from home and been refused refuge in the Owada apartment, has met a young street boy, who rapes and robs her, abandoning the innocent girl in an inn where the local prostitutes beat her and steal her clothing. Kumiko is forced to join them to survive.

       In the final and most moving scene of this film, Fusako accidently meets up with Kumiko when she is called to observe a beating of the young intruder into an older prostitute’s territory. Recognizing her, Fusako demands that the women cease beating her, but the girl, now as hard-boiled as her sister-in-law, is unrepentant and determined to remain on the street, in response to which Fusako herself beats the young girl, taunting her for her degeneracy and the condition of her life before breaking down into tears, the young girl seeking solace at her knee. Determined to take the girl to safety and, finally, to abandon the profession herself, Fusako lashes out against the other violent women, who, in turn, fall upon her, beating her relentlessly. A group of on-looking prostitutes finally intercede, realizing the truth of Fusako’s insistence that “there should be no women like us."

 

     So Mizoguchi’s film ends, strangely, with a moral indictment, damning these “women of the night.” But given the harsh conditions of these postwar women and the continual unfeeling righteousness of several of the religious and social figures the director has revealed throughout, it appears that the director is somehow ignoring the implications of his own tale. Despite the frankness of Mizoguchi’s film, offering up open discussions of prostitution, rape, syphilis and women committing violence, the denouement would seem to return these women once again into home-bound roles that often means complete self-sacrifice.    

     Although Woman of the Night quite clearly shows us that it is the men in these women’s lives who have helped to destroy them, the film ultimately seems to suggest that the women alone must redeem themselves, must reject the demeaning and destructive roles they have embraced. In a strange way, however, it is only as prostitutes that these women seem to have any power in the post-war Japanese society. Mizoguchi does not show one woman, other than the child-like acolytes of the women’s refuge—given daily quite meaningless “pep” talks by the center’s director—who is permitted any dignity. It is clear that the sometimes “rightist” film director was of two minds about the predicament of his “women of the night,” quite brilliantly revealing their plights while blaming them for their decision to choose this method of survival. The paradox he has created is nonetheless fascinating, certainly worth pondering through viewing this mesmerizing film.

 

Los Angeles, June 5, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2013).      

Michelangelo Antonioni | L'Avventura / 1960

outside the frame

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, and Tonino Guerra (writer), Michelangelo Antonioni,

(director), L’Avventura / 1960

 

When L’Avventura was first shown at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the audience expressed their hostility to the film with whistles, foot-stamping, and derisive shouts. Although the movie was more enthusiastically received by the critics, and won that year’s Special Jury Prize, its American premiere resulted in a near-complete puzzlement on the part of noted critics such as Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times. “Watching L’Avventura (“The Adventure”), which came to the Beekman yesterday, is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have gotten lost. Just when it seems to be beginning to make a dramatic point or to develop a line of continuity that will crystallize into some sense, it will jump into a random situation that appears as if it might be due perhaps three reels later and never explain what has been omitted.” “’Tis strange,” Crowther concluded.

     If over the years Antonioni’s film has grown in reputation, even its admirers have continued to stress the film’s seemingly disjunctive and unconventional narrative. My beloved guide to World Film Directors describes the work as eschewing conventional narrative, as a film “without story.” Film historian Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, in a lovely essay on L’Avventura, reprinted in the New Criterion DVD of the film, describes it as a groundbreaking work that revealed 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 audiences 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 unclear to themselves as much as to the audience. …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.

 

     In short, while still admitting to the difficulty of Antonioni’s cinema masterwork, admirers argued—concurring with the director’s own comments published in his Cannes Statement—that the narrative was a non-psychological one, that although the characters might be aware of their erotic impulses, being conscious of them does not diminish their force: “The fact that matters is that such an examination is not enough. It is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure. For even though we know that the ancient codes of morality are decrepit and no longer tenable, we persist, with a sense of perversity that I would only ironically define as pathetic, in remaining loyal to them.” Nowell-Smith argues that this non-psychological approach, in fact, changed the face of cinema in representing its characters as doing unexpected things in unexpected places, as acting in ways which are recognizable perhaps but which do not conform to the previous cinematic “clichés of how we think things ought to happen.”

     Although I had previously missed viewing this important film, I knew of its reputation and had read just such comments. Upon finally getting the opportunity to view it, accordingly, I was surprised at how differently from both its detractors and admirers I perceived it forty-six years later.

     Perhaps it is simply because I prefer less traditional psychological narratives that I saw the movie so differently. Or perhaps over these many years our perceptions of films and cinematic images have so radically changed that it is difficult to understand the reactions of filmgoers and commentators in 1960, the year when I had just become a teenager.

     Maybe one should begin with the dominating feature of the movie: its images shot primarily in shades of gray, the blasted landscape of the island where the action begins, and the several small Sicilian villages and town—with their sometimes menacing and often liberating architectural structures—the central couple explore in the second half of the film, today still seem fresh. As we know through his other films (it is the theme, indeed, of his Blow-Up) Antonioni primarily is a filmmaker whose art is centered on how the camera reveals and creates meaning as opposed to using images to structure a narrative presentation of the real.

     The narrative of L’Avventura, accordingly, is a loosely strung series of events. A group of affluent vacationers are gathered on a yacht off the coast of Sicily. Among the passengers are Anna (Lea Massari), her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), along with Patrizia, yacht’s owner, Raimondo, Giulia, and Corrado. Anna and Sandro have evidently been having some difficulties with their relationship, particularly concerning Sandro’s recurring absences, and—as the group decides to swim and, later, explore a nearby deserted volcanic island, Brasilazzo—she confesses to Sandro that she needs some further time away from him in order to reassess their affair.        The visitors settle down for a pleasant sun-bath, but when they begin to plan their departure, they realize that Anna is nowhere in sight. At first, they presume she’s simply gone for a short walk, and Sandro and Claudia, in particular, irritatedly searches for her. When their efforts fail, the others join in, scouring the small mountainous island, ultimately peering into the waters about in fear of an accident or (is it possible?) suicide. Anna cannot be found, and most the group return to the yacht to seek out help from the nearest police station. Sandro, Claudia, and Corrado remain on the island, a rainstorm driving them into a small cabin they have discovered in their searches. Writing of the movie, nearly all previous commentators have been mystified or, at least, bothered by the fact that Antonioni’s story never reveals what becomes of Anna.

    It is during the search for Anna that we first begin to perceive that Claudia and Sandro are attracted to one another; by the end of their search, they desperately attempt to keep a distance between themselves. Sandro leaves the island to check other nearby islands—compelled by the possibility that Anna escaped on a passing boat they may have heard—while Claudia agrees to join the party at the Montaldo’s grand house.

     At their palazzo, however, Claudia becomes more and more distracted as she obviously feels increasing guilt for ceasing to search for her missing friend and simultaneously is drawn to reconnoiter with Sandro. Gloria’s vengeful flirtation (her husband has verbally abused her throughout the early part of this film) with the young Prince Goffredo adds to Claudia’s sense of displacement and frustration. Hearing that Sandro is traveling to a small town where a pharmacist has claimed to have encountered Anna, she leaves her sanctuary, meeting Sandro as he enquires into the facts. After meeting with the pharmacist and his unhappy wife, the couple follows his suggestion that Anna may have taken the bus to Noto. As they travel in that direction their passion for each other boils over, and stopping briefly at a seemingly deserted village whose ugly architecture repels them, they consummate their love in a field nearby.

     The rest of the story primarily concerns their vacillating passion set against the landscape of Noto. When they finally check into a hotel on the outskirts of town, having nearly abandoned their attempts to find Anna, they encounter Patrizia and others in the midst of a grand party which they are suddenly expected to attend. Claudia claims to be too tired; Sandro, attending the party without her, is drawn to a girl who, from a distance, looks remarkably similar to the dark-haired Anna.

 

    Claudia is unable to sleep, and when Sandro fails to return, she goes in search of him, discovering her new lover and the woman having sex on a banquet-room couch. As Claudia runs from the building in tears, Sandro joins her, himself breaking down in remorse. The film ends with her stroking his head in apparent forgiveness for his sexual digression.

      There is no doubt that the plot I have just recounted is minimal and that character motivations—some of which I have interpolated in my above description—are often left vague. The immensely slow pace of the film’s “story,” moreover—the director’s almost indolent presentation of events (it is not incidental that both female characters spend much of the movie in bed and that near the end of the film, as I have recounted, the major actor is simply too tired to participate in events)—draws the viewer’s attention away from the film’s narrative conventions. Nonetheless, I would argue that the tale of this missing woman and its effects on the characters are quite comprehensible to even a novice of psychological motivation.

     This is not the story, after all, of two women who fall in love with the same man, but of the love of three individuals for each other. An early scene on the yacht soon after Anna has pretended to spot a shark (a clear cry for help), in which she and Claudia remove their swimsuits and play a game of “dressing up,” ending in Anna’s offering of her costumes to Claudia (perhaps hinting to her friend that she “take over” her life), reveals the closeness of these two women. I am not implying that the two have a lesbian relationship—although, given the film’s narrative openness, this scene suggests there may be sublimated sexual desires, a possibility reiterated by an earlier scene in which Claudia impatiently and rather frustratedly waits outside the apartment where her friend and Sandro have sex. But I proffer these incidents up as evidence that they are more than casual friends. And, if nothing else, Antonioni is certainly exploring female homoeroticism in these scenes.

      Let me play the role, for a moment, of an amateur psychologist. As anyone who has lost a close friend knows, there is often a mutual attraction—if for no other reason than to share in the inevitable guilt of surviving and the need to heal one’s sense of loss—between friends of that individual. If the relationship has also been a sexual one, as with Anna and Sandro, that attraction can further extend to a sexual desire between the remaining friends. As in many such instances, these two figures attempt to deny that attraction, which only ends in further frustration and greater unassigned guilt. Each can only feel that they are, in part, responsible for whatever has happened; and in this case, they have some reason to suspect they are personally culpable. The pent-up emotions can gradually grow to enormous proportions until—as Antonioni has suggested—the codes of morality are broken. Claudia and Sandro are emotionally compelled to release their shared love for Anna in the arms of one another, and everything in their own pasts comes tumbling upon them in that act. As Claudia says, life has become complicated. The gentle strokes that Claudia shares with Sandro at film’s end, accordingly, do not emanate perhaps as much from her acceptance of his personal betrayal as from her recognition that in his sexual encounter with the stranger he has sought to assuage his guilt, to be reunited with the missing Anna. Finally, one must not overlook the obvious, that each of them is an unmarried, attractive young person to whom the other quite simply is sexually drawn.

      The reason these characters seem so fresh to us and so removed from the standard cinematic (and dramatic) stereotypes is not because the characters act without motivation—any of the thousands of cartoonishly drawn film figures of the last forty years might be representative of such unmotivated behavior—but because they are so deeply psychologically drawn. These actors behave like real people facing intense personal dilemmas. In opposition to Gloria and Goffredo’s childlike sexual flirtations, Sandro and Claudia are flawed adults who act out the natural whims—the “adventures”—of mind and heart. The only alienation they must face relates to the empty-headed friends of the fiction in which they are imprisoned, for Sandro and Claudia are recognizably close to those of us who wait outside the camera’s frame.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2006

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2006).