The only surprise in the latest from BFI Film Classics is that it’s taken so long to get around to Michelangelo Antonioni’s ground-breaking masterpiece. Lambasted at Cannes in 1960 it may have been, but its detractors’ reign was short lived over a film now largely regarded as one of the touchstones of European cinema.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s task is a little tougher than many in the BFI collection, books often content to examine their subject by means of a tight dissection of plot. But as anyone who has ever seen L’Avventura can contest, plot is not something with which it is exactly overburdened. A young woman goes missing on an small island off the Italian mainland. Two of her friends mount a search up and down the coast, gradually falling in love. Far from being explained, the disappearance is eventually forgotten.

But Nowell-Smith’s book is surprisingly approachable, given the notorious complexities of Antonioni’s marvellous spatial cinema. Starting with the Cannes controversy, he traces a tempestuous production (a budget collapse mid-way, oddly, rescuing the film’s startling ambiguity), and briefly attempts to throw some light on the stark beauty and existential majesty of the final picture.

There is a sense that just over 70 pages is scarcely sufficient to even nod towards the fascinating enigma of L’Avventura, let alone explain it away, but the judicious use of widescreen frame stills, and the author’s unexpectedly unembellished prose make this a handy primer for both converts and Antonioni virgins alike.