Northwest Film Forum

With their two-faced cattiness and cold-blooded sexual manipulation, the women of Antonioni’s Le Amiche make the promiscuous characters of Sex and the City look dull in comparison. 

Though this social drama of stylishly dressed and sharply tongued women-among-women has been largely overlooked amidst Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni’s celebrated oeuvre, it’s among the most entrancing views of love's sweet devastation seen in cinema.

After years away, Clelia returns to Turin with plans to open a fashion salon. She immediately learns of the attempted suicide of the woman in the room next to hers, which in turn introduces Clelia to a new social circle of artists and wealthy people, whose romantic entanglements become the center of the story. Nowhere in Antonioni’s other films has an ensemble of characters woven a more complex web of relationships.

(Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata with funding 
provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.)

“One of Antonioni’s greatest films!" —David Thompson, Time Out London