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Le Amiche from 1955, an Italian film with English subtitles.
Dated mainly in superficial ways, the moving and complicated personal, relationship, and class challenges faced by director and co-writer Michelangelo Antonioni's fully drawn characters in Le Amiche are still relevant today because the core human condition changes very little.
Le Amiche is consistent with Antonioni's other films, which typically focus on mood, conversation, and characters over structured plots. Le Amiche, however, is "tighter" than his other work, which can indulge in too many long, lingering shots that slow the narrative down.
Present-day cinema, with its often unforgiving view of gender roles and relationships, could learn from this 1955 Italian film, which is surprisingly open minded as it explores and respects both traditional and modern views – many of which are still being debated.
It opens when Clelia, a young, successful businesswoman, returns to her hometown of Turin to open a fashion salon for her employer. After the woman, Rosetta, in the hotel room next to Clelia, attempts suicide, Clelia is drawn into that woman's clique of upper-class young women.
Clelia herself comes from a poor, working-class neighborhood, but having succeeded in the fashion industry, she presents as a refined, upper-class woman. She can fit in with Rosetta's friends, but she still has an outsider's view of them.
The friends, who all seem to have enough family money not to work – other than one, Nene, who is a successful ceramics artist – spend their days shopping, going to lunch, gossiping, being bored, and complaining about the men in their lives.
One of the men, Lorenzo, who lives with Nene, is a struggling painter – it's never easy to be the less successful one in a relationship, but in 1955 Rome, it's emasculating for a man. Another of the men, but not part of the group, is Carlos, the assistant architect working on Clelia's shop.
While Clelia comes from the same working class that Carlos does, presented here, he's still of that class and has little chance of moving up. So while romance buds a bit between the two, there's an odd class divide where, once again, the woman is doing better than the man.
The central dynamic, though, is Rosetta's suicide attempt, which is gossiped about but only rarely addressed directly to Rosetta. She then begins an affair with Lorenzo, who is happy for the attention away from Nene, but of course, Rosetta is fragile.
Antonioni uses this thin plot to explore, through the intimate conversation of the story's mainly "bourgeois" characters, themes of class prejudice, love, sexual relationships, careers, gender roles, and finding purpose in life.
He is at his best in developing the personalities of his characters as you come to understand what drives and motivates each woman. You'll like some, like Clelia, and dislike others, like selfish and manipulative Momina, but only a few feel like stereotypes.
While their world looks incredibly different from ours – they dress much nicer to go for a fall-day walk on the beach than most dress for office work today – their personalities, ambitions, and challenges seem modern to any young, educated group of friends.
Women realize that there are trade-offs between career, relationships, and starting a family. Fair or not, and acceptable to say it or not, the placement of the ball on that field has moved to a much better position today, but the game is still being played.
The same can be said of "two career" relationships, as you don't need to search hard to find articles about the challenges they present, especially if the woman is much more successful than the man. That might not reflect well on men, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
Sadly, despair and suicide are still with us, meaning many still know someone like Rosetta and how hard it is to help someone struggling with depression.
Shot in black and white and on location around Italy, this view of the young, rich, and pseudo-intellectual at play is striking, especially with only a few visits to the working-class neighborhoods to remind us that life here is not all outdoor cafés, beautiful clothes, and fast cars.
Antonioni, in Le Amiche, tells several normal-life stories that are special because they are explored through well-developed characters whom we recognize despite superficial time-and-place differences.
Often, it's the plot, but in Le Amiche, it's the characters and their lives that make the movie special.
