Alexander says: “Antonioni’s first major feature appeals to my own interest in telling provincial stories with a strong sense of place. Based on a novel by Cesare Pavese, this stunning movie takes us inside upper class Turin.”

Clelia moves to Turin and falls in with a group of women of luxury whose love lives are impossibly tangled together.

“The expressive elegance of Antonioni’s camera movements — the way he glides around a scene, composing and recomposing the human figures within it to suggest psychological patterns and unacknowledged erotic connections — still has the power to amaze. And his fascination with women is inflected by a sympathy that might be called feminist. The main characters pursue their desires and ambitions under constraints imposed by custom and by the brute impossibility of men. Which is not to say that the women are perfect or that they see themselves as victims. On the contrary, what makes LE AMICHE so bracing — so sad and, sometimes, so funny — is that its heroines are fallible, flawed, vain and powerful, each in her own way. They often make one another miserable, but their company is always a pleasure.” — A.O. Scott