Australia – "Le amiche" by Michelangelo Antonioni
The film Le amiche (The Girlfriends) (1955) is one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s acute investigations on the bourgeois word, empty and lacking in ideals.
There is no real friendship or love between these women, tied by cold formal relationships inhibiting any intimacy or affection. And relations with men are not better: men are indifferent, egoistic, and superficial creatures, reluctant to dialogue and mutual comprehension.
It is Antonioni’s fourth feature film, and for the first time, the director was inspired by a literary work – Cesare Pavese's novel Tra donne sole (Among Women Only). He was well aware of the risk and difficulties of the enterprise: «Bringing the story to the film just as it is, would have been not only impossible but maybe damaging to Pavese himself».
There are many differences and few similarities between the novel and the film, but «The first merit of Le Amiche is to be important as a film in itself, as a film by you, Mr. Antonioni, independent of Tra donne sole», says Italo Calvino in an open letter to the director on the magazine “Notiziario Einaudi”.
And continues: «The observation of the costume business, which for Pavese had a purely material constructional value as a lyric and moral definition, here comes into the foreground, as suits the task of cinema, and as is in conformity with the vocation of the bitter observer of a bourgeois generation, a view you formulated with such coherence in your previous films and here brought to its most complete expression».
Le amiche was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory with funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
Thanks to the co-operation by the Italian Cultural Institute of Sydney, on April 30 it is presented within Cinema Reborn, a film festival dedicated to the history of the art of cinema, the world-wide activity of film restoration, and the treasures that exist in the world's film archives.
The Festival takes place in Sydney, at Ritz Cinemas, from April 29 to May 2.