When is an artist the artist we discover them to be over the course of their career? The perverse pop-art of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 “Zabriskie Point” is plainly the work of his Swinging London “Blow-Up” (1966). His exploration of urban space and the distances between alienated, contemporary characters is also recognizable as the same author’s work, in movies like “L’eclisse” and “L’avventura,” black-and-white dissections of time, architecture and thwarted desire, lovingly collated and anatomized in Criterion DVD editions. But Michelangelo was likely Michelangelo even as a babe, you’d guess from the restored 35mm print of his 1955 “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends), a rare adaptation from the filmmaker. The acting is more emphatic, the melodrama of a 1950s Italian cast, but yet… men and women, exceptionally striking women, enact roundelays of attraction in mid-century modern settings. All the ache and isolation of the movies to come are there, and hardly in germinal form. The mysteries of solitude already transfix Antonioni, and even a twenty-first-century audience should be able to recognize a great film from an already-formed sensibility. Adapted from a novella by Cesare Pavese. With Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese. “Le amiche” comes from ambitious young distribution company The Film Desk: urrà for cinephiles! (Ray Pride)
The 35mm restoration of “Le Amiche” plays Saturday-Monday at Siskel.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
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