#817: ANTONIONI, Michelangelo: Le Amiche (1955)

ANTONIONI, Michelangelo (Italy)
Le Amiche [1955]
Spine #817
Blu-ray

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 is a brilliantly observed, fragmentary depiction of modern bourgeois life, conveyed from the perspective of five Turinese women, four of whom are trying to make sense of the fifth's suicide attempt — and finding themelves examining their own troubled romantic lives in the process. With suggestions of the theme of modern alienation and the fastidious visual abstraction that would define such later masterpieces of his as L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Red Desert, Antonioni's film is a devastating take on doomed love and fraught friendship.

104 minutes
Black & White
Monaural
in Italian
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2016
Director/Writers


With the collaboration of Alba De Cespedes.

A

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

The Booklet

Twelve-page wraparound featuring an essay by film scholar Tony Pipolo.

Commentary

None.

Conversation

With scholars David Forgacs and Karen Pinkus on the film’s themes.

Interview

With scholar Eugenia Paulicelli on the importance of fashion in Antonioni’s work.

Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

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