film, eyeballs, brain

Here’s Francois Truffaut, talking about Antonioni:

I don’t like the way he deals with women, because instead of talking about them as a man would, he talks about them as though he had been told their secrets, like General De Gaulle telling the Algerians, ‘I have understood you.’ He flatters women, but it doesn’t seem authentic to me.

Which says more about Truffaut than Antonioni, really, but Le Amiche, an early Antonioni film, perhaps demonstrates the first half of the quote right: it’s about women’s secrets, for sure, but there’s nothing particularly flattering about how Antonioni sees them here.

The movie centers on Clelia (played by Eleonora Rossi Drago), the newly-arrived manager of a fashion atelier in Turin. She’s in for something of a rough welcome: not only is the boutique still unfinished, the woman in the apartment next to hers has tried to commit suicide. Slowly she is drawn into a circle of women, and she becomes the recipient of their companionable, female solidarity — and, as it turns out, their jealousies, infidelities, and petty squabbling. The circle turns instead into a web.

It’s actually all fairly conventional, and more so by Antonioni’s standards; Le Amiche isn’t filmed with the same oblique cinematic grammar that would characterize his later works. As they’re introduced, the women fall quickly into a series of familiar, if more complex types (the tart-tongued vixen, the hedonistic social butterfly, the emotionally fragile one, the ambitious artist cuckolded by her husband, etc.), and much of the unhappiness that ensues is partly due to their male suitors and lovers. It’s a little disconcerting to see all their catty, if later injurious, banter fly unfettered, without all the expected emotional restraint of an Antonioni film — somehow, it doesn’t seem right that we should be privy to this — but all this is perfectly, unmelodramatically poised. At no point does it get manic like an Almodovar film; what sustains the narrative tension is the constant possibility that hysteria, no pun intended, just might push its way through the veneer of upper-class politesse.

But what makes Le Amiche most interesting to me, at least, is that the seeds of Antonioni’s later masterworks are already, thrillingly, present: his critique of the idle moneyed class, the miscommunication between women and men (and each other), his fascination with repetition and doubling, the central enigma of a “missing” woman. Nowhere is this visually clearer than a series of sequences set on a beach, when the girlfriends and their coterie of men stand framed against sand and grass, each arrangement reflective of their relationships with or isolation from each other. Le Amiche is fascinating in the light of what came after; on its own, it’s not quite an unheralded masterpiece in my opinion. But it’s certainly not the colonial-dictatorial sentiment Truffaut expresses above.

[Here's the Hell on Frisco Bay review.]

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