the woman from rome
by
Douglas Messerli
Michelangelo
Antonioni, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, and Alba De Cespedes (writers, based on the novella “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 novella, 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.
Unlike The Women, who are intelligent
but spend most of their loves caring for their bodies, attending fashion shows,
and most of all gossiping about one another, this small coven of accidental “friends”
are closer to closet feminists, particularly Clelia, who has come to Turin (her
hometown) from Rome to open up a new salon like the one she has in the capitol
city.
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 worried that Rosetta may
attempt suicide once more, and Mariella attempts 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.
Moreover, as the “girlfriends” gradually
perceive, the three men in their lives are simply not reliable, as the women
come to realize that they are much stronger and able to deal with life than the
males around them.
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 returns 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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