Le Amiche

New 35mm Restoration! ► Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni’s fourth feature, dating from 1955, may not be one of his best-known films, but it may be one of his best. Le Amiche, literally “The Girlfriends,” has now been given a beautiful new restoration (by the Cineteca di Bologna, with funding support from Gucci and The Film Foundation) that will further burnish its growing reputation as a film that anticipates and even rivals the director’s finest achievements. Eleonora Rossi Drago heads the cast as Clelia, a young woman who returns from Rome to her native Turin to open a fashion boutique, and falls in with a high-society smart-set of suicidal models, philandering artists, and back-stabbing idle rich. Based on a novella by Cesare Pavese, this stylish study of bourgeois malaise very much presages, in theme and form, Antonioni’s celebrated early ’60s trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse; the command of sequence shots and real time, the linking of character with landscape and environment, the interest in women and their anxieties, and the deft handling of diverse plot strands, multiple characters and shifting relationships, all mark The Girlfriends as a major Antonioni work. The film won a Silver Lion at Venice in 1955. “The film merits all possible superlatives” (Philip Strick). “Proves that Antonioni's greatness did not begin with L'Avventura” (Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 105 mins.