Michelangelo Antonioni

Le amiche

Le amiche

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 (The Girlfriends) is a brilliantly observed, fragmentary depiction of modern bourgeois life, conveyed from the perspective of five Turinese women. As four of the friends try to make sense of the suicide attempt of the fifth, they find themselves examining their own troubled romantic lives. With suggestions of the theme of modern alienation and the fastidious visual abstraction that would define his later masterpieces such as L’avventura, L’eclisse, and Red Desert, Antonioni’s film is a devastating take on doomed love and fraught friendship.


Le amiche was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1955
  • 106 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #817

Special Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New conversation with scholars David Forgacs and Karen Pinkus on the film’s themes
  • New interview with scholar Eugenia Paulicelli on the importance of fashion in Antonioni’s work
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Tony Pipolo

    New cover by Ron Miller

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New conversation with scholars David Forgacs and Karen Pinkus on the film’s themes
  • New interview with scholar Eugenia Paulicelli on the importance of fashion in Antonioni’s work
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Tony Pipolo

    New cover by Ron Miller
Le amiche
Cast
Eleonora Rossi Drago
Clelia
Gabriele Ferzetti
Lorenzo
Franco Fabrizi
Cesare
Valentina Cortese
Nene
Yvonne Furneaux
Momina
Madeleine Fischer
Rosetta
Anna Maria Pancani
Mariella
Luciano Volpato
Toni
Maria Gambarelli
Clelia’s employer
Ettore Manni
Carlo
Credits
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Produced by
Giovanni Addessi
Screenplay by
Suso Cecchi D’Amico
Screenplay by
Michelangelo Antonioni
With the collaboration of
Alba De Cespedes
Music by
Giovanni Fusco
Cinematography by
Gianni Di Venanzo
Film editing by
Eraldo Da Roma

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Michelangelo Antonioni

Director

Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (including writing the story that was the basis for Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik, and directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating films about bourgeois Italian life Story of a Love Affair and Le amiche), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti, his lover at the time—L’avventura (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert—have stood the test of time. And his less iconic later films, like Identification of a Woman, have only grown more compelling and mysterious as the years have passed.

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