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Le amiche



This major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous. Le amiche (The Girlfriends) is a brilliantly observed, fragmentary depiction of modern bourgeois life, conveyed from the perspective of five Turinese women. As four of the friends try to make sense of the suicide attempt of the fifth, they find themselves examining their own troubled romantic lives. With suggestions of the theme of modern alienation and the fastidious visual abstraction that would define his later masterpieces such as L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Red Desert, Antonioni's film is a devastating take on doomed love and fraught friendship.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New conversation with scholars David Forgacs and Karen Pinkus on the film’s themes
• New interview with scholar Eugenia Paulicelli on the importance of fashion in Antonioni’s work
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Tony Pipolo

Really great - and interesting to see how the transfer matches up to the MoC BR... The extras are a bit thin on the ground - Forgacs on the film & especially Eugenia Paulicelli on the fashion (in the salon by the Sorelle Fontana) should be good - but a pity they couldn't add in a MA short or two such as L'AMOROSA MENZOGNA or even more aptly SETTE CANNE, UN VESTITO... I'm hoping also that this release may be something of a warm up for BLOW UP later in year...

Above all, LE AMICHE (THE GIRLFRIENDS) is the first really great Antonioni film of his career - I was in Turin recently retracing the steps of the production... And what the Criterion blurb doesn't mention, it is an adaptation of the celebrated modern novel by Cesare Pavese, TRA DONNE SOLE (AMONGST WOMEN ONLY), and so is worthwhile comparing book & film...

Blu-ray.com

Svet MD wrote:I think that without the Trilogy of Alienation Le Amiche most likely would have remained Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece.

It's like not even the third or fourth best movie he made on the other side of that trilogy

That reminds me: I still haven't finished L.A. Noire.

Looking forward to this one. Though more substantial extras might have been nice. For those interested, there's a rather peppy trailer up on YouTube (with French subs).

Ribs wrote:Blu-ray.com

Looking at those caps, has the contrast been Criterion-boosted a bit? That was my only minor gripe with the MoC release.

As for the film, yeah it's a little dull. I suppose it's best viewed today as a dry run for L'Avventura without the fancy visuals and as a halfway house between neorealism and his later modernism.

It's an excellent film if you take it as an example of a ensemble melodrama with realist overtones (a major subgenre in postwar Italian film; another excellent example is Adua and Her Friends), and if you're attuned to Antonioni's facility with staging for the long take. If you come to it with expectations of the monumentalism/portentousness of his later films, you'll be disappointed. (I Vinti seems to me the more obvious precursor of L'Avventura.)

This played a lot better for me the second time, and feels more like a gateway film to Antonioni's 60s-and-beyond works than I recalled. The major theme here seems to be 'belief' and 'disbelief' in social milieus, specifically how one clings to social belief to feel a sense of order and stability in a lonely industrialist, individualist atmosphere, and likewise cannot contend with disbelief experienced. This doesn't just go for the obvious situations like Rosetta's attachment to Lorenzo, but Momina's early obsession with finding clues to make sense of Rosetta's suicide attempt - turning a sad situation into a game, not because she's evil (though as we get acclimated to her character, she's definitely hiding safely behind superficial ideas of relationships and lifestyle, probably as a form of self-protection against disbelief) but because she desperately needs to be included in the knowledge to feel like she's on stable ground. Nene likewise gives up her dreams to cling to a social belief of being loved. I suppose one could also read this film as occupying different attachment styles regarding one's lovability: Clelia, Momina, Nene, and Rosetta all taking different approaches and working with unique sensitivities, but still under a more universal spectrum of seeking to feel lovable (even if in Clelia and Momina's cases, that can mean gaining various distances from the risk). Diving into 'belief' blindly may be the only way to truly believe, but it is dangerous, even if it grants the only reprieve from the superficialities of this world.