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“L’avventura” and Human Weakness

“L’avventura” and Human Weakness

Last updated on: August 12, 2026 at 12:01 pm by Zachary Miller

“L’avventura” and Human Weakness 2026-08-12T12:01:44-06:00 Zachary Miller

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Cino Del Luca via “IMDb”

Today’s piece is going to be a little different for a few reasons.

The subject of today’s study is an artful Italian film from 1960 called L’Avventura. The film sees a woman named Anna going out for a day on an island with some associates, including her best friend, Claudia, and her lover, Sandro. During their outing, Anna goes missing, which naturally causes distress. The police are called, and Claudia and Sandro initiate their own search, bound by their shared love of Anna. But being drawn together in this way ignites other emotions as well, and the two of them become romantically entangled.

This presents all sorts of conundrums for the two of them, who discover that finding out that Anna is alive would actually be devastating for their situation. All the while, Claudia feels the weight of taking advantage of her friend’s disappearance. By the film’s ending, Claudia ends up finding Sandro with another woman–learning that while they have both been unfaithful to Anna, Sandro has also been unfaithful to her.

I saw this film for the first time during my formal film studies, which I’m certain is where everyone encounters this film for the first time. Its slow-burn rollout and dialogue heavy plot progression leave it with very little commercial appeal. This is one of those movies fated to never be brought up during a family reunion, but it will forever be brought up by players like Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson when they’re discussing which movies are truly “important.” These movies are a hard commercial sell, but I do believe that even “the plebians” of the film world would serve themselves by familiarizing themselves with them.

As is common in these types of intellectual “film school” films, the ending does not offer a lot of answers. We don’t find out whether Anna is actually alive, for example. Rather, the film just forces the characters to sit with their decisions and reflect on what it means for them.

And as is also common in these types of films, the conclusions tend to center around Claudia and Sandro’s indiscretions revealing something about the inescapable nature of human failing. One of my most referred to film books, “A Short History of The Movies 9th Edition” has Gerald Mast and Bruce F Kawin assessing, “But if Sandro’s education is to discover the human weakness that makes betrayal so inevitable, Claudia’s education is to discover that betrayal is a fact of human life. ‘Human’ and ‘fallible’ are unfortunately synonymous; any meaningful human relationship must start from that definition.”

There’s a suggestion that reconciling herself to Sandro’s own failings, declaring it an “inevitability,” is what allows Claudia to forgive herself for betraying her friend’s trust. People make mistakes, and that does not mean that they are all wretched creatures of the pit who don’t deserve love or grace. There’s value in that. When you indulge in feelings of shame or unworthiness, toward yourself or others, you wind up reinforcing unhealthy attitudes. We discussed this when looking at Act of Violence, The Skeleton Twins, and Scent of a Woman. There is value in that perspective.

There is also a caution.

We can call what Claudia and Sandro did human nature. Or, we can decide that two people who knew very well how biological attraction functions chose not to sufficiently safeguard their behavior, such that their human appetites overcame their sense of decorum. This was not “inevitable.” This is a result of choices that were made.

Anna’s disappearance also coincides with Sandro and Anna confronting the growing gap in their relationship. Anna wants her and Sandro to get married, but Sandro insists that this would only complicate their situation. And so her sudden absence becomes a kind of realized metaphor for the growing emotional distance that eventually becomes too great to ignore. This is another thing that may have motivated Sandro and Claudio to become romantically entangled. And it is yet another thing that resulted directly from their human behavior–first in Sandro’s neglect of Anna, and second in his refusal to parse through any feelings of guilt.

(And while, yes, it takes two to tango, it is worth putting out there that Sandro is the one who makes the first romantic gesture when he kisses Claudia–some hours after Anna has been discovered missing. I’m just saying, there probably is a revelation to be had with Claudia finding Sandro on the couch with yet another woman, but maybe that revelation is that Sandro is just not a suitable romantic partner and needs to sort out his feelings about dropping out of art school on his own.)

My intention in this is not to cast either Sandro or Claudia into the inferno. Neither is this me declaring that this movie is bereft of moral insight. But I do want to draw attention to how the rationalizing of sin can often sound like grace, as well as how often this presents itself as some advanced form of intellectualism. “Isn’t it better to face things as they are?” can sound like a grown-up way of viewing world, but it can also be an easy way to permit indulgence, leaving broken hearts and broken spirits in its wake.

A person can reconcile themselves to human weakness without lubricating it.

Cino De Luca via “MyMovies”

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