Le Amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)

Yvonne Furneaux, Eleanora Rossi Drago, Anna Maria Pancani, and Valentina Cortese in Le Amiche

Clelia: Eleanora Rossi Drago
Lorenzo: Gabriele Ferzetti
Cesare Pedoni: Franco Fabrizi
Nene: Valentina Cortese
Momina: Yvonne Furneaux
Rosetta: Madeleine Fischer
Mariella: Anna Maria Pancani
Tony: Luciano Volpato
Clelia's Employer: Maria Gambarelli
Carlo: Ettore Mani

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alba De Cespedes
Based on a novel by Cesare Pavese
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Production design: Gianni Polidori
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Giovanni Fusco

The usual rap on Michelangelo Antonioni's films by those who dislike them is that nothing happens, when in fact all sorts of things happen, from mysterious disappearances to murder. What sets Antonioni's films apart is that things happen almost randomly, without the usual dramatic buildup, and that the way his characters react to the things they witness or that happen to them is not usually the way we would react to them. So Le Amiche starts with an attempted suicide to which the sophisticated women who form the circle of "girlfriends" of the film's title react with a kind of detachment and indifference, even though the woman who tried (perhaps not very hard) to kill herself was one of them. Even Clelia, the outsider who will soon become part of the little circle and who discovers the unconscious Rosetta, seems to take the occurrence in her stride. The next on the scene is the brittle, cynical Momina, who knows Rosetta and accepts her suicide attempt as something like a part of the routine. And so we, along with Clelia, are thrust into a group of people in whom something essential seems to have atrophied, producing several fractured marriages and dead-end affairs. Clelia has come to Turin, the city where she grew up, to supervise the opening of a dress shop, part of a chain headed by the designer for whom she works. So it's the world of fashion superimposed on a place Clelia knew in the immediate postwar years as a grimy working-class city, and her point of view on the lives of the girlfriends is a special one. Partly in reaction against these wealthy women and their ineffectual men, Clelia takes up with Carlo, a supervisor on the construction of the shop, who shares her lower-class roots in the city. But you can't, as they say, go home again. The film is full of Antonioniesque touches that anticipate his major works of the 1960s. There's a visit to the beach where the behavior of the girlfriends and their men evokes some of the behavior that precedes the disappearance of Anna in L'Avventura (1960), and there's a breathtaking cut from the suicidal Rosetta walking away into the darkness to a high-angle shot of her white-shrouded body on the pier after she succeeds in killing herself. Antonioni antagonists will find nothing in Le Amiche to counter their charges of "arty ennui," but those of us who appreciate his work, even if we have to struggle sometimes, think this earlier film is almost the equal of his later work.

L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

The ironic title -- an "adventure" in which nothing adventurous occurs -- is enough to establish L'Avventura as one of the most subversive films ever made. It subverts narrative by never resolving its initial mystery, the disappearance of Anna (Lea Massari). And as a film about sex, it is notably anti-erotic. Antonioni's (and his cinematographer Aldo Scavarda's) camera is in love with Monica Vitti's Claudia, exploring her unconventional beauty in extended closeups. It is the "male gaze" -- the objectifying, depersonalizing view of women -- at its utmost. But then Antonioni subverts the male gaze by two scenes in which it is exposed in full and repellent play: The first is when the would-be celebrity Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo) causes a near-riot in the streets of Messina. The second, more bitter scene comes when Claudia, having left Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) to fetch Anna from the hotel in Noto where she thinks she may be staying, begins to be surrounded by more and more men, like a pack of feral dogs, casting eager, exploring stares at her. The sex in L'Avventura is troubled, like that between Anna and Sandro that earlier had left Claudia standing alone and idle in another street. Or the relationship of Claudia and Sandro that develops after Anna's disappearance, leaving neither of them particularly eager to find her. In the end, Sandro proves incapable of remaining faithful to Claudia, all too ready to ease his boredom with, of all people, Gloria Perkins, who returns to prowl the hotel in Taormina in search of paying customers. Before their liaison, Sandro is eyed by a woman who stands in front of a painting of Roman Charity, in which a woman breastfeeds an elderly man, a scene that blurs the distinction between charity and lust. After Claudia discovers Sandro and Gloria in flagrante, she flees the hotel in tears, followed by Sandro, and the film concludes with a scene in which her gestures, stroking his hair as he weeps, demonstrate her own form of charity -- or is it lust? L'Avventura presents us with a world in which the conventional and expected word and action never takes place. It was fashionable at the time the film was released to say that it was a depiction of alienation and ennui. But films about alienation and ennui invariably wind up alienating and boring, as many of the subsequent films made under its influence (including some of Antonioni's own) tediously demonstrated. L'Avventura didn't point out a viable direction for other movies, but it remains, like many great films, sui generis.  

The Confession (Costa-Gavras, 1970)

Ideologies are only as workable as the people who believe in them, which given the human drive toward power isn't very much. Costa-Gavras's film hasn't really dated much since its release 45 years ago. We are still faced with ideologues whose sole aim is to increase their own power in the name of some group or faction -- witness the current disarray of the Republican Party caused by the recalcitrance of the Tea Party faction in Congress. Which is not to say that the purge of John Boehner is anything as grave as the purges in the communist party in the Soviet Union under Stalin in the 1930s and in Czechoslovakia under Stalinist puppets in the 1950s. Yves Montand plays Gérard, a Czech communist official, based on a real figure, Artur London, who was accused of being a Trotskyite and a Titoist and of collaborating with American spies. He resisted torturous interrogation as long as possible before confessing. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was released after serving several years in prison. The film ends with Gérard, still a disillusioned but hopeful communist, witnessing the 1968 Soviet crackdown against the "Prague Spring" reformists. It's an overlong but often effective movie, with fine performances by Montand, Simone Signoret as his wife, and Gabriele Ferzetti as the interrogator Kohoutek, a former Gestapo agent recruited by the communists to crack the people they want to purge.