84. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For &...

Lyrics

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you

I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believed it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I am starting to like U2's music more and more. Which is a bit of a shame, because I also am starting to become more and more irritated by Bono's world savior act, which besides being more than a bit hypocritical (and to some extent dishonest) is also quite problematic in other ways. The fact that he felt that he needed to make some sort of statement about Mandela with Ordinary Love and that he kind of  presents himself as a spokesman for Mandela's ideas is exemplary of that. On the other hand, I think Ordinary Love is one of the best popular pop songs I've heard in recent years. I really like it a lot. I also think it's the best U2 song after One and With or Without You. I also quite like this song, and I like it more than when I first heard it. I once saw a tweet being retweeteed about a movie that stated that the particular movie could have better been called like this song. Considering it is a movie made by a director associated with existentialist questions I believed the tweet and chose to link this song to that movie, my first of that director.

The Movie: L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)

I don't know what it says about me, but I did not have much trouble connecting to this movie.  I thought it was a movie that was very realistic about human nature. I liked it a lot and I look forward to seeing more films by Antonioni.  I don't think the characters here are exceptionally shallow, or exceptionally annoying, or exceptionally despairing, or other similar traits. They maybe are compared to heroic, passionate, moral characters in other movies, who would be desperate to solve a mystery, such as Rex was in Spoorloos, which I previously discussed on this blog. There we saw Rex unable to commit to a new relationship until he knew exactly what happened to his mysteriously disappeared wife. But I don't think it's all that cynical to say that most people in Rex' situation would behave similarly to Sandro and Claudia here. When Anna (Sandro's fiancee and Claudia's best friend) disappears during a cruise trip to the Aeolian islands, Sandro, Claudia and their co-travelers are at first distressed and are seriously searching the island, trying to find a clue about what might have happened to Anna. Sandro and Claudia even remain for a couple of days on the island, but in the end the search is fruitless and eventually all Sandro can do is report Anna missing at the nearest police station.

In the second half of the film considerable amount of time has passed since then. Sandro and Claudia travel Southern Italy, ostensibly to look for clues for Anna, but mostly to spend time with each other and frolic around in different hotels. The people complaining that not much happens in the second half of the movie are to some extent right. Not much happens indeed, but what should happen? Anna is not found and will not be found. Sandro and Claudia are no heroes, but ordinary people who cannot do much about that. They have to accept that and they do.

Life goes on, the world will keep on turning on without any regard for individual troubles, so you might as well try to make the best of every situation. And that's what Sandro and Claudia do. Antonioni also visualizes this philosophy very well. He very often, especially during the search on the island, films an actor in the foreground doing something, while in the background we see some other actor(s) doing something unrelated to the actor in the foreground. Everybody goes its own way and has his own troubles to cope with and does so in a very individual way. (One could also connect this to Antonioni's existentialist reputation and claim that this signifies that everybody is alone in the world). Antonioni also does this in what is for me the best scene of the movie. In the second part of the movie Sandro meets a couple of drawing artists and semi-accidentally drops ink over their drawings. One artist goes up to him, trying to beat him up, only to be restrained by the other artists. Angry but realizing that a fight would be fruitless they let Sandro go, trying to restore the drawings as best as they can. The camera pans away from them, while we see them doing this, while we see Sandro leaving and accidentally joining a group of monks (or something similar) walking somewhere. At the same time we see in the background a bunch of kids joyfully playing soccer, completely oblivious to Sandro, the monks, or the artists. Life goes on for everybody.