Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is the most acclaimed Italian writers of the 1940s. Shortly before committing suicide in 1950 he received the Premio Strega (Strega Prize) for fiction, Italy's most prestigious literary award. Five of his late novels have recently been published in the New York Review series. The first major film of Michelangelo Antonioni (born in 1912), the 1955 "Le Amíche" (translated as "Girlfriends"), based on one of Pavese's four (or, depending on how one counts, seven!) 1949 novels, Tra Donne Sole (Among Women Only) has just been released on a bare-bones DVD from Image.*

"Le Amíche" is unlike the (later) Antonioni films that I know in (1) having many characters who (2) are very loquacious. I guess that he pared down from "Le Amíche" to "Il Grido" (1958) and "L'aventurra" (1960) to an alienated pair in "La notte" (1961), "L'eclisse" (1962), and "l deserto rosso" (1964), and then to one person (and, surprisingly given his Italian films, that one was male David Hemming and Jack Nicholson) in "Blow-Up" (1966) and "The Passenger" (1975) to none in "Beyond the Clouds" (1995) (and the end of "L'eclisse," back to two in his segment of "Eros" (2004).

Pavese's novel and most Antonioni movies have a very strong sense of place. The place in "Le Amíche" is Torino (Turin), where Pavese grew up and went to school, with a trip to the beach (of the Langhe?). The narrator of the novel and protagonist of the film is Clelia (Eleonora Rossi-Drago), a woman originally from Torino, who has been sufficiently successful in Rome to be sent to oversee the preparation and then manage a branch couture shop in Torino.

Plot spoiler alert

Clelia's first night in a hotel is disrupted by a maid getting into the adjacent room, where a rich young woman, Rosetta Savoni (Madeleine Fischer) has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Through her accidental involvement in averting Rosetta's suicide, Clelia meets Rosetta's "friends" (a pit of vipers), who are the stratum at which the new shop aims (and not the one in which Clelia grew up).

Who Rosetta had been calling before taking the pills is a question for the hotel staff. The answer is Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti), a painter whose portrait of Rosetta is in a show that opened the night of Rosetta's suicide attempt. Lorenzo is married to Nene (Valentina Cortese [The House on Telegraph Hill, Day for Night), a "friend" of Rosetta. It seems that Rosetta fell in love with Lorenzo while he was painting her, but that he did not know that and nothing had happened between them.

The group, including Cesare Pedoni (Franco Fabrizi), who is the architect of Clelia's salon and is having an affair with Momina (Yvonne Furneaux). The outing is joyless at best, prefiguring "L'aventurra" in several ways, including a disappearance of sorts.

Clelia has a tentative sort of romance with the foreman of the building project, Carlo (Ettore Manni). She thinks that he might have been her husband had she stayed in Torino, but Rome and mingling with the upper class has altered her expectations and tastes.

The main confrontations occur during the opening of the salon and in and outside the restaurant to which the group adjourns after the opening. Clearly, the audience is supposed to side with (or even identify with) Clelia. I feel sorry for Rosetta, as does Clelia, but so does Nene and I don't buy Clelia's denunciation of Nene (there is no one in the film with whom I'd identify).

End plot-spoiler alert

"Le amiche" showed that Antonioni could run a multi-ring circus, not just isolation à deux. Clelia forefigures the compassionate observant participants Monica Vitti would play in the films that made Antonioni internationally famous. Gabriele Ferzetti prefigured his own part in "L'aventtura" as an artist realizing he's not particularly talented. And Rosetta who seeks to annihilate herself (but really has very little self or sense of self to annihilate) prefigures Anna, who mysteriously disappears in "L'aventtura."

The general failure to connect--not just between the sexes but among the women--that is central to the Antonioni oeuvre is front and center, and the representation of aimless wandering through city streets and rocky beaches (or, later, deserts) is already prominent in "Le amiche." As in other late Pavese novels and throughout Antonioni's oeuvre, affluent women wander aimlessly through empty lives. The young Marx, prophet of alienation, had not become fashionable in the first decade following the end of WWII, but pinning spoiled, back-stabbing idle rich to the page and screen seems what being "Marxist" meant for Pavese after fascism and the Nazi occupation and for Antonioni (through, and I'd argue beyond, the 1985 stroke in which he lost his ability to speak).

Had I not been viewing it as an early Antonioni film, I probably would have seen it even more in relation to Rosselini's films of Ingrid Bergman as an unsatisfied haute bourgeoise, "Europa '51" and "Voyage to Italy." Eleonora Rossi-Drago bears some resemblance to Bergman, and the 1950s fashions provide a further visual link.) (Digging online, I found that there was a direct Antonioni-Rosselini link: back in 1942 they cowrote 1942 "Un pilota ritorna."

For those lacking a pre-existing interest in Pavese and/or Antonioni and/or the Italian left's fascination with upper-class chic, "Le Amíche" is a soap opera that showed Italian women in the 1950s not being dominated by men (not toying with sex and relationships to the extent of "Sex and the City," and entirely lacking a sense of humor, but not showing women as victims of macho men.)

The DVD has no bonus features (but I recently saw the 2001 "Antonioni: The Vision that Changed the Cinema"; indeed that stimulated me to begin re-examination of Antonioni's body of work, despite having been bored by his contribution to Eros. (Plus, I've been reading Pavese.)

The print from which the transfer was made was very good, or Gianni Di Venanzo's cinematography was remastered.

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(As usual, Epinions misdisplays the title. Anything with diacritics cannot be found through the Epinions search engine. They can be found in the Shopping.com search engine, but both sites need to enable these characters--which Epinions used to handle).

BTW, the cover photo from let to right shows Eleonora Rossi-Drago, Valentina Cortese, Madeleine Fischer, and Yvonne Furneaux.

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* Among Women Only is in The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese, which I reviewed at http://www.epinions.com/content_400678620804.

My voyage through Antonioni films that are available on DVD reached back to Cronaca di un amore (1950) and is moving toward the relatively recent DVD release of the long-unavailable "The Passenger."


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray





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