Michelangelo Antonioni’s LE AMICHE will screen May 29 & 31 at Titanus festival at Lincoln Center
LE AMICHE (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Friday, May 29, 4:15, and Sunday, May 31, 9:00
Festival runs May 22-31
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
Winner of the Silver Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival, Michelangelo Antonioni’s sublimely marvelous Le Amiche follows the life and loves of a group of oh-so-fabulous catty, chatty, and ultra-fashionable Italian women and the men they keep around for adornment. Returning to her native Turin after having lived in Rome for many years, Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) discovers that the young woman in the hotel room next to hers, Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer), has attempted suicide, thrusting Clelia into the middle of a collection of self-centered girlfriends who make the shenanigans of George Cukor’s The Women look like child’s play. The leader of the vain, vapid vamps is Momina (Yvonne Furneaux), who carefully orchestrates situations to her liking, particularly when it comes to her husband and her various, ever-changing companions, primarily architect Cesare (Franco Fabrizi). As Rosetta falls for painter Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti), who is married to ceramicist Nene (Valentina Cortese), Clelia considers a relationship with Cesare’s assistant, Carlo (Ettore Manni), and the flighty Mariella (Anna Maria Pancani) considers just about anyone. Based on the novella Tra Donne Sole (“Among Only Women”) by Cesare Pavese, Le Amiche is one of Antonioni’s best, and least well known, films, an intoxicating and thoroughly entertaining precursor to his early 1960s trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse. Skewering the not-very-discreet “charm” of the Italian bourgeoisie, Antonioni mixes razor-sharp dialogue with scenes of wonderful ennui, all shot in glorious black and white by Gianni Di Venanzo.
LE AMICHE explores world of catty, chatty, ultra-fashionable women in Turin
Recently restored in 35mm, Le Amiche is a newly rediscovered treasure from one of cinema’s most iconoclastic auteurs. It is screening on May 29 at 4:15 and May 31 at 9:00 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Titanus: A Family Chronicle of Italian Cinema,” a ten-day, twenty-three-film retrospective honoring the Italian production company founded by Gustavo Lombardo in 1904 and later run by his son, Goffredo, and grandson, Guido, that remained active until 1964 (although it continues to occasionally release work). The festival displays the wide range of Titanus’s output, including Dario Argento’s The Bird with Crystal Plumage, Camillo Mastrocinque’s Little Girls and High Finance, Raffaello Matarazzo’s The White Angel, Elio Petri’s Numbered Days, Federico Fellini’s The Swindle, Giorgio Bianchi’s Cronaca Nera, and Dino Risi’s The Sign of Venus, but not Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard; the tremendous cost of filming Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s epochal novel played a major role in the company’s downward fortune.