Antonioni’s magnificent melodrama returns to Film Forum by popular demand
LE AMICHE (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
August 25–31
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
After its much-hailed one-week run in June at Film Forum, the 35mm restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s LE AMICHE returns by popular demand, playing August 25-31, and there’s just no reasonable excuse for missing it again. Winner of the Silver Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival, the 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 a novella 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 is a newly rediscovered treasure from one of cinema’s most iconoclastic auteurs.