the woman from rome
by Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo Antonioni, Suso Cecchi D'Amico,
and Alba De Cespedes (writers, based on the story “Tra donne sole” by Cesare
Pavese), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) Le amiche (The Girlfriends)
/ 1955
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le amiche,
from 1955, does not have the deep intensity or for that matter the complexity
of his great trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse of the
1960s; but as The New York Times critic A. O. Scott noted about a 2010
revival of the film, it is, nonetheless, “enchanting and strange.”
I’m not sure I’d use those exact terms. L’Avventura, when I
reviewed it a few years ago, did not appear as experimental and unconventional when I reviewed it a few years ago, as it clearly was
to the critics of the day. And this film, based on a Cesare Pavese story,
reads, at times, more like an updating of George Cukor’s 1939 film, The
Women than something like Blowup, although the latter is also based
on a short story, and features, like this film, fairly well-off and
sophisticated arts people.
Yet here, unlike Cukor’s chestnut, there are men, with whom the five
central women friends—Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago), Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer),
Momina (Yvonne Furneaux), Neme (Valentina Cortese), and Mariella (Anna Maria
Pancani)—fall in and out of love.
The locals, Rosetta and Neme, are in love with a handsome, but failed
artist, Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti). Although currently married to Neme, he has
painted a portrait of Rosetta, who has fallen in love with him through the act,
and hence, given the impossibility of their love, begins the melodrama by
attempting to kill herself; fortunately for the film, she does not succeed, and
instead gains a new friend Clelia who happens to be staying in a hotel room
next to hers.
Momina, married, lives in an open relationship, mostly with architect
Cesare (Franco Fabrizi) who is too
slowly rebuilding Clelia’s new shop. So too Momina’s protégé Mariella would
love to develop a relationship with him.
The more down-to-earth Clelia, meanwhile, falls for Cesare’s
working-class assistant, Carlo (Ettore Manni), but quickly realizes that she
has long ago moved out of her own working-class roots and that if they truly
became a couple realizes, as she tells him, “We would just fight about
furniture.”
Perhaps the film’s strangest scene is when this entire group takes off a
day to travel to the beach, where they play out some of their fears and
frustrations, Clelia being worried that Rosetta may attempt suicide once more,
and Mariella attempting to seduce Cesare, while all around them couples appear
to be having sex in the shadows of the beach shacks and dunes.
It is a brilliantly paced scene, languid yet brittle with tension. And
suddenly what might have seemed to be friendship and love turns out to be a
kind of existentialist drama wherein each figure must face her inner self. None
of the people, we now perceive, really belongs with the others. And despite
some of their career successes, none of them is truly fulfilled.
There are parallels and foreshadowing’s here of Fellini, in whose films
it is almost always the women who ground their lovers and explore more
adventurous worlds than the males to whom they are linked. One need only think
of Giulietta Masina in his Juliet of the Spirits.
The woman from Rome finally gets what she wants, a fine new salon, after
which quickly hikes back for where she’s come. Neme is offered a show of her
ceramics in the US. Momina, a strong and dominant woman, will clearly survive.
Only Rosetta, the previous survivor, cannot assimilate her mistakes and finally
succeeds in committing suicide, and it appears that Clelia alone truly cares
about the young woman in the next room who has died. Unfortunately, the
ever-flirtatious Mariella must still come to terms with the truth.
Los Angeles, December 2, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December
2019).
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