Le Amiche (1955)

☆ ☆ ☆ 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.