Le Amiche

Antonioni's film set in Turin, from Cesare Pavese's novel Among Women Only. Clelia comes from Rome to Turin to run the opening of a fashion house. On her first night in the hotel, the young woman in the next room attempts suicide. That is how Clelia enters the city's wealthy circle: five women, permanently together, permanently discussing each other's lives. The film does not turn on a murder or a secret; it watches how close these women are and how little that closeness does. Clelia, the only one who works, never quite gets inside the group, and class is the film's silent subject. Eleonora Rossi Drago plays Clelia. Everything that will become familiar in Antonioni's later films is already assembled here: something happens, nobody is affected by it as they should be, and life continues with the same emptiness. It won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1955. An early and more accessible way in for anyone who loves his 1960s trilogy. For a viewer who wants incident, nothing is resolved.