☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Le
Amiche (1955) – M. Antonioni
Antonioni’s 1950’s films adhere more
consistently to narrative conventions than his films of the 60’s; however, Le
Amiche’s plot still tends to wander. We
are led to identify with Clelia, who is visiting Turin from Rome in order to
set up a dressmaker’s salon. In Turin,
she falls in with a group of women after discovering a failed suicide in an
adjacent hotel room. Antonioni then
demonstrates, through a variety of social situations, just how bitchy and
alienating this social circle is to those within it. Even the woman who attempted suicide readily
betrays one of her friends by having an affair with her husband (later to
appear as Sandro in L’Avventura, a film that builds on and extends the themes
here). But the husband is too self-concerned to be able to see how his actions
will affect either of the women (wife and friend) with whom he becomes
involved. Antonioni’s attention to the various
characters fluctuates but none gain too much depth, apart from Clelia who seems
sympathetic but ultimately ambivalent toward these new “friends” in Turin. As he would continue to do throughout his
career, Antonioni depicts the idle rich as pursuing lives of meaninglessness
and cruelty; as a film, Le Amiche represents one more step on the road toward
the exciting levels of abstraction he would achieve later on to convey this
theme.
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