Le Amiche

Academy Award®-winning director Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, Beyond The Clouds) explores women's evolving role in society and the conflict between love and career in this engrossing drama.

Clelia, a beautiful young woman who lands her dream job in a glamorous Italian fashion house, soon finds herself plunged into a cruel world of phony, shallow people. The only honesty in her life is the pure love offered by Carlo, a young, socially impoverished assistant architect. But is it enough? With its fascinating, multi-layered story, rich characterizations and superb performances, Le Amiche remains one of Antonioni's most beloved works.

Criterion.com:
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.