Le Amiche

There are moments in some of Michelangelo Antonioni's films in which one of his characters is obviously bored and can't seem to find anything to occupy them. They are extraordinary moments because they are so courageous - provoking critic John Simon to ask how a filmmaker can accurately portray boredom without boring the audience? Comparably, how can a filmmaker accurately portray superficiality for the entire length of a film without seeming to be superficial?

Antonioni's fourth film, Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) looks inside the world of a circle of fashionable women in Turin. Every one of them, including a talented artist invited to exhibit her work in New York, is a sphinx without riddles. Even Rosetta (played by Madeleine Fischer), who fails in a first attempt at suicide and succeeds in a second, throws herself at the husband of a friend, who is poorly equipped to love anything but his own illusions of artistic talent.

A professional woman, Clelia (Eleanora Rossi Drago), arrives in Turin to oversee the opening of a fashion salon and is plunged into this tepid pool of nullities when she happens to find herself in a hotel room adjoining the one in which Rosetta has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She is pulled into the group of Rosetta's friends - Momina, Nené, and Mariella - out of curiosity about the lives of these privileged women (whom Clelia had once held in contempt) and about Rosetta's motive for taking an overdose. 

Men play various roles in their lives, as lovers and husbands (or both), but they are, typically in Antonioni's films, colorless and ineffectual. Gabriele Ferzetti plays Lorenzo, husband of Nené (Valentina Cortese) and lover of Rosetta. And it's as if his role is a dry run of Sandro in L'Avventura, also played by Ferzetti - another disaffected artist (an architect) who always manages to let the women who love him down. Then there is Cesare (Franco Fabrizi), architect for Clelia's salon and estranged husband of the permanently unfazed Momina (Yvonne Furneaux). Carlo (Ettore Manni) presents Clelia with a sentimental journey through her working class origins, but he is also a big letdown as we watch him at the film's conclusion hiding behind a mobile newstand as Clelia's train pulls out of the station.

We, too, become involved with Rosetta's troubled life, but not because she is any more substantial than her friends. She throws her life away, after all, because she is rejected by Lorenzo. She is unable - or unwilling - to see his advances for what they are, as definitive proof of his unreliability. For his part, Lorenzo refuses to leave Nené because she alone understands this about him. ("But why do you still love me?" he asks her. "Perhaps because I pay such a high price for you," she replies. Valentina Cortese even places her hand on the back of Gabriele Ferzetti's head, the same gesture used by Monca Vitti at the end of L'Avventura.)

Clelia manages to avoid prolonged suffering over Rosetta's suicide by throwing herself into her work, returning to her job in Rome. She is the most complex character in the film by far because she is the most self-sufficient. Carlo represents her sentimental nostalgia for her youth in Turin. Wandering the streets looking for furniture for her salon, she and Carlo happen upon her old neighborhood. She even thinks she recognizes a woman from her past life, now older, and wonders if she herself might have turned out like she did if she had stayed in Turin. Carlo even suggests that they might have married. But Clelia is too intelligent to give in to such daydreams. And so, ultimately, is Carlo.

Winter in Turin. The cinematography, by Gianni di Venanzo, is superb, especially in the exteriors of Turin and an excursion to the sea that is supposed to cheer up Rosetta. The beach in winter is cheerless ("Look how dirty the ocean looks!" Momina exclaims), but it provides Antonioni with opportunities for some striking compositions - figures grouped in foreground and background, a slight movement of the frame taking in a pair of lovers in the sand. And always Rosetta isolated against the surf. Some of the girls express concern, but Momina tells them, "Listen, if she would throw herself into an ocean like that, there's really no hope." Rosetta eventually throws herself into the still dirtier Po River.

Antonioni based his film (liberamente ispirato) on the next-to-last work published in the lifetime of Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide (in a hotel room) with an overdose of barbituates in 1950. In his novella, Tra Donne Sole (Among Women Only), Pavese's strategy was to introduce to an established milieu a character from the outside who provides us with an objective view of it and his own inability to engage with it, either because he doesn't have the proper emotional equipment or simply because he or she is incapable of escaping from their native solitude.

By making Rosetta's motivation for killing herself more explicit than in Pavese, Antonioni somewhat lessens its impact. That Pavese's suicide was partly motivated by his fizzled affair with Hollywood starlet Constance Dowling may have been in Antonioni's mind. Still, it is a plot device from a filmmaker who would eventually eschew plot altogether in his best work.

Antonioni uses his long takes effectively. The film looks splendid, as every Antonioni film does. I watched as eight principal characters - five women and three men - systematically fail one another until one of them can't take it any more and drowns herself in a river. The remaining characters blame one another or console one another, but nothing changes except Rosetta is no longer there to disturb the sleek surface with her troubled presence. It reminded me at times, unflatteringly, of a Visconti film.

A curious encounter occurs near the end of the film that has no bearing on the story. At the Turin train station, Clelia is waiting for Carlo to appear before her 10 PM train departs. She stops at a phone booth and tries to call him. A man, with his back to the camera, acts as if he recognizes Clelia or wishes to speak to her. When he approaches her we see him smiling at her, but she simply gives him a deprecating look and walks away to her train. There are similar scenes in both L'Avventura and La Notte in which Antonioni shows us women (Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau) being confronted by the unwelcome attention of men. In both cases, the woman walks away and the film resumes on its course. One is left wondering if such scenes represent Antonioni's attitude toward the human male or toward a certain class of Italian males.

Unlike Pavese's novel, which was published in 1949 when Italy was still regaining its feet, what the film exudes from the start is affluence. The women are all dressed like they stepped out of Vogue, circa Winter 1957. (All of the clothes in the film were supplied by the House of Fontana.) In fact, the actors' clothes are more than a little overwhelming. Even Rosetta is dressed in an evening gown and earrings when they find her after her suicide attempt. This was always Antonioni's chosen world, and he would explore it in his subsequent work, with the exception of the experimental Il Grido.

I'm guessing that the smothering fashionable clothes was Antonioni's point - that these people, as much use as so many tapeworms, are so frivolous, what they wear is what they are: fashion statements that are timely for only the moment, chic but shallow. He would visit the world of fashion again in Blow-Up, in which he was absorbed by the life of a successful young photographer and by what he witnesses - or thinks he witnesses - take place in a pretty little London park.

Looking back on Antonioni's career, every film that he made prior to L'Avventura (1960) was a failure. But they weren't all the same failure. Since every film he made in the '50s leads us to L'Avventura, one of the greatest films ever made, we can be thankful for them. In every one of them, in The Story of a Love, The Lady Without Camellias, even in the muddled Il Grido and the three-part I Vinti, we can see that Antonioni was reaching for something he couldn't quite grasp. In Le Amiche, however, he managed to touch, at moments, what he was reaching for. It is the best of his films before L'Avventura. If any other director had made it, its admirable qualities would've caused us to remember him. Asked in an interview when Le Amiche was released what advantage, if any, he had over Cesare Pavese, Antonioni said simply "I'm alive."