“The whole problem of life is this,” wrote the Italian author Cesar Pavese in his diaries, published after he took his life in 1950, “how to break out of one’s solitude, how to communicate with others.” The previous year, Pavese captured modern-day alienation in Among Women Only. The novel is told from the first-person perspective of Clelia, a Rome fashion designer who returns to her hometown of Turin to open a new shop but becomes enmeshed in an aimless swirl of parties, meaningless romances, and tangled friendships among a group of women. The book culminates in the unexplained suicide of one of its main characters, Rosetta; in turn, eerily foreshadowing Pavese’s death. With its cool tone and vision of malaise mapped onto a haunted urban landscape populated by affluent but disaffected characters, the novel reads like the treatment for a film by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Indeed, Antonioni was drawn to the novel and it became his first adaptation of another writer’s work. In an interview collected in Ian Cameron and Robin Wood’s 1969 book Antonioni, the director said that what he liked in the book were the “female characters and their way of living out what goes on in their inner selves. Also one of the characters is like someone I knew only too well in reality.” Adapting Pavese’s novel, Antonioni decided to eliminate the narration provided by Clelia, who is as much an observer as a participant through much of the book. Antonioni also collaborated with two prominent women screenwriters, Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Alba de Cespedes, to add depth to all of the other female characters in the film. They succeeded in presenting them as modern women, breaking from tradition and actively finding ways to focus on their artistic work rather than rushing to marry and have children. In an open letter to Antonioni about the film, Italo Calvino wrote, “Your contribution in the film lies in having been able to look at this world with a sharp eye […] bringing pitilessly into the light the elemental cruelty, the superficial sensuality, the permanent cowardice in the face of the most demanding moral crises.” Throughout the film, Antonioni contrasts the refined aesthetics of his characters against their emotional detachment; a budding romance is derailed because the couple has different tastes in furniture.
As contemporary as the film is, Le Amiche is also a product of its time and marked by compromise. In Pavese’s book, Rosetta’s suicide seems to result from her own ennui and the shallowness of the life she leads with her friends. In the movie, it is tied to a melodramatic trope, that of a mistress spurned by her lover. The novel’s numerous suggestions of lesbian love, and of Clelia’s casual sex affairs, are also removed. And instead of the novel’s chillingly abrupt ending, we get a heart-wrenching departure at a train station—a scene that may represent an artistic compromise, but is also a brilliantly staged tear-jerking farewell that, to Antonioni’s credit, is worthy of Brief Encounter (1945). Despite the occasional reliance on conventional dramatic devices, Le Amiche is clearly the work of a forward-thinking filmmaker. The film’s modernity is alive in Eleonara Rossi Drago’s enigmatic performance as Clelia. Antonioni would soon discover the endlessly expressive Monica Vitti as his favorite lead actress, but in Le Amiche, Drago is self-contained and unyielding, almost Bressonian by comparison.
Le Amiche screens this afternoon, March 15, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “Matías Piñeiro Selects.”
