THE STORY – Summer holidays. Sardinia, Italy. A family (road) trip. Claudine, soon to be 11 y.o., decides to tell the story of their adventures as they go along. When Raoul, her 3-y.o. brother, doesn’t bother her…
THE CAST – Sophie Letourneur, Philippe Katerine, Bérénice Vernet & Esteban Melero
THE TEAM – Sophie Letourneur (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes
“It’ll be an adventure,” says Sophie, mother of two and protagonist of this chaotic, sun-drenched family trip. And an adventure it is – if your idea of adventure involves defecating toddlers, sweat-soaked breakdowns, frayed tempers, and a twelve-year-old with a smartphone recording app doubling as the family’s unreliable historian. With “L’Aventura,” the film’s star and director, Sophie Letourneur, crafts an intimate, documentary-esque picture that peels away the glossy myth of the summer holiday to reveal the raw nerve underneath. It’s a road trip movie where the GPS is broken, the timeline makes no sense, and the destination, if there is one, might just be the memory itself.
Filmed with a hybrid eye for documentary realism and farcical dysfunction, “L’Aventura” follows Sophie, her partner Jean-Phi (Philippe Katerine), her precocious daughter Claudine (Bérénice Vernet), and the endlessly exasperating toddler Raoul (Esteban Melero) on a road trip through Italy. This isn’t the stylized, sun-kissed version of the country we’re used to seeing onscreen; it’s sweaty, noisy, and chaotic. It’s the kind of family vacation that leaves you wondering why anyone ever thought traveling with children was a good idea.
The film is framed loosely and loopily by Claudine’s audio recordings on her smartphone, meant to capture the trip in real-time. But instead of offering structure, these recordings fracture the narrative further. Letourneur deliberately breaks chronology, doubling back on scenes we’ve already heard about or seen, only to present them slightly altered or misremembered. The past becomes the present, the present is already fading, and everything starts to feel like it’s being pieced together from secondhand anecdotes and half-formed memories.
This meta-framework gives “L’Aventura” its strange, dreamlike texture – part vacation slideshow, part therapy session. The central idea isn’t just how we live our lives but how we remember (and misremember) them. Arguments erupt not just about what to pack or where to eat but over how things happened. Everyone remembers it differently, or not at all.
Raoul is an adorable terror, shrieking and pooping his way through every scene. Jean-Phi is an embodiment of existential fatigue, often trying and failing to nap through the screams. Sophie herself breaks down more than once over the stress of it all. And Claudine, with her curious, slightly jaded tone, offers narration that is both sharp and disarmingly wise. Letourneur films this family as if observing a real one, with a voyeuristic edge to it. She lets the frame overflow with conversation and chaos, which feels deeply lived-in.
At times, “L’Aventura” can feel too repetitive, even disorganized. The film circles back on itself so often that we start to lose track of time, which might arguably be the point. It captures the strange temporal fog of vacation, where days blur together, moods shift abruptly, and memory fails before the trip ends. There’s a compelling honesty to that confusion, the way every family trip is both unforgettable and somehow instantly forgettable. The characters are stuck in the very moment they’re trying to immortalize. There’s also an undercurrent of existential dread that creates comedy, like a storm cloud over a beach picnic. The family isn’t just on vacation; they’re unraveling, together and apart.
The final scene, composed of home-movie footage from Letourneur’s own memories, folds the fictional family back into a real one. The fourth wall vanishes entirely. We realize this film might be a gesture to preserve something from fading away. Maybe that’s the true motivation behind the constant recording, the obsession with memory: to keep the family alive, not just in the present, but in playback.
“L’Aventura” is sometimes a messy, repetitive, and frustrating watch. But that may be the point. It tests your patience like a real vacation can, which makes it feel uncannily familiar. It perfectly captures all the ups and downs of vacation. Something that’s supposed to be relaxing makes you tired and irritated by the blazing heat and growing annoyance with everyone around you. There are moments when you want to go home, but when the time actually comes, you leave wishing you could go back and do it all again.
