L'avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni (1960)

Two young women, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), meet up for a yacht trip. After picking up Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), the three join two wealthy couples from Rome on the boat and wind up visiting Lisca Bianca, an almost unpopulated volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, where Anna shows her boredom and unhappiness with the sometimes childish Sandro. After napping on the rocks, they awaken to find that Anna has gone without a trace. Annoyed at first, then worried, they search for her, helped by Anna's diplomat father, who soon comes to the island with a police ship and helicopter.
However, within a few days they all drift back into their own lives as the story shifts to a new and somewhat stormy relationship between Sandro and Claudia, who is at once happy and wracked with guilt over her missing best friend. On the rooftop of a cathedral, Sandro asks Claudia to marry him, but she is mostly too startled by this to answer in a meaningful way. The two then check into a swank resort hotel near Messina where Sandro's business partner is staying. While Claudia goes to bed, Sandro stays up and wanders among the partying guests. Claudia spends a more or less sleepless night waiting for him to come back to their room, and as dawn breaks frantically searches for Sandro throughout the now deserted public spaces of the hotel, only to find him on a couch with a costly call girl. Claudia flees them both and breaks down into tears on a vista overlooking the sea. Sandro, seemingly disgusted with himself, catches up to her.
The last scene, which has no dialogue, starkly shows Sandro's almost hopeless weakness and emptiness as he sits in tears before a blank, scarred wall while Claudia stands steadfastly beside him, Mount Etna brooding behind her as if ready to erupt…

Antonioni’s penetrating study of the idle upper class offers stinging observations on spiritual isolation and the many meanings of love.
Many films are called “classic”, but few qualify as turning points in the evolution of cinematic language, films that opened the way to a more mature art form. Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (The Adventure) is such a work. It divided film history into that which came before…