A young woman, Anna, leaves her suburban home to join friends on a yachting expedition; while exploring a volcanic island, she disappears, leaving her lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and close friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), to search in vain, and fall in love. The film unfolds against Anna's very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna's pain ("I don't feel you any more") is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes between Claudia and Sandro prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a stand-off, a sizing-up as before a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L'Avventura is rich in Antonioni's visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.