Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1955 • Italy
Starring Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco Fabrizi
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.
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
Up Next in Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
-
L’avventura
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica VittiMichelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’AVVENTURA concerns the enigmatic di...
-
La notte
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1961 • Italy
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica VittiThis psychologically acute, visually striking modernist work was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to the epochal L’AVVENTURA. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a n...
-
L’eclisse
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1962 • France, Italy
The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni's informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L'avventura and La notte), L'eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts ...