Le Amiche

Le Amiche (1955) is Michelangelo Antonioni's drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Clelia returns from Rome to her native Turin to open a branch of a fashion house. On her first night at the hotel, the woman in the next room swallows a bottle of pills — and Clelia is pulled into a circle that isn't hers.

These are well-off Turin women whose marriages, affairs and boredom hide behind polite smiles. Rosetta survives the overdose; her love for a painter does not. Around her move the sharp-tongued Momina, the gentle Nene, the cynical Lorenzo. Clelia, who clawed her way up from poverty, watches their idleness as an outsider and learns that friendship here gets paid for in betrayal.

Antonioni adapted the film from Cesare Pavese's novella Among Women Only and took the Silver Lion at Venice for it. His signature is already here: emptied streets, long silences, women lost inside their own lives long before that became fashionable. This isn't loud melodrama but a quiet dissection of how loneliness hides under small talk. Stream Le Amiche (1955) online on iFILM.