I tried to read Cesare Pavese’s short novel, Among Women Only, but decided it was not for me. The film adaptation by Michelangelo Antonioni, from 1955, however, is a very enjoyable human-condition piece. Le Amiche (The Girl Friends) is Antonioni’s title for the film, and beautiful girl friends they are.

After a suicide attempt, Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer), who is emotionally weak, is encouraged by her friend Momina (Yvonne Furneaux), cynical and corrupt, to pursue the engaged man with whom she has fallen in love. This is Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti), a moral failure who knows he must prove his love for his devoted wife-to-be, Nene. Rosetta is a moral failure too, one no longer able to bear life. A strong examination of unrequited love, Le Amiche is obviously sad. Earnest and savvy too.

Cover of Storytelling

Todd Solondz‘s Happiness (1998) was such an insufferable film it prompted me to wonder whether Solondz was the slightest bit capable of ever creating a good one.  His 2002 offering, Storytelling, proves that he is, in addition to demonstrating just how puny his talent is for anything exceeding half an hour.  Two independent tales, you see, constitute Storytelling, and only the 30-minute one (“Fiction”), not the hour-long one (“Nonfiction”), works.  In the latter we get confused and meretricious trash about a documentary filmmaker and the Jewish American family he will camera-shoot.  The story never clicks.  Solondz handles the material with cynical misanthropy, of course, but he does the same with the shorter “Fiction,” with a nice result.

“Fiction” tells of a lefty college girl (Selma Blair) who is callously dumped by her cerebral-palsied boyfriend before taking “solace” in the anal sex ministrations of her black creative-writing professor.  He all but rapes her.  The story concerns the fictions on which people feed so indulgently that they refuse to look sordid behavior straight in the face.  It concerns idealism in a vacuum.  Solondz scores with concision and wit, and has worked well with the actors in “Fiction.”  It’s a very sexy thirty minutes too, but with none of the foolish offensiveness of Happiness. 

A laughable nihilist, at least Solondz has not destroyed the whole of Storytelling.

So long as your husband has a job, just let him be unambitious.

‘Tis a lesson Kathy Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck) should have learned in the 1956 Crime of Passion. Her husband Bill (Sterling Hayden) is a detective who’s not looking for the future promotion that Kathy would like him to have. Hence the woman engages in some hanky panky to try to ensure this headway. It’s a mistake.

Interestingly, this follows Kathy’s indignant reaction—she has long been a city girl—to the superficiality and complacency she sees in the suburbs where she now lives. It’s pretty melodramatic. Stanwyck’s acting, however, is impressive. And the movie is a grabber. I didn’t feel the connection between Kathy and Bill for a long time, but then close to the end it develops. (Yep, they love each other.) I should also submit that I like Sterling Hayden’s acting less than I like his presence.

The inarticulate fall in love in The Boy Downstairs (2017), a film by Sophie Brooks. Diana and Ben, both young, barely know how to verbally express themselves, not at all helped by the fact that Diana, long after a breakup with Ben, unknowingly moves into his apartment building. Ben has a new girlfriend, but after he calls it quits with her, he gets together with Diana. Both are able to say I love you, but have trouble remaining an item. Transience rules. The characters believe there is weight before finding only weightlessness.

Zosia Mamet (Diana) and Matthew Shear (Ben), though nearly overplaying the couple’s uncertainty, carry the picture with verity. Boy‘s first few scenes are considerably stronger than its last few scenes, but director-writer Brooks often avoids predictability and commonplace crassness. I saw the film on Tubi; it deserves a look.

The short story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” offers a title character who, for sure, maintains a life of the mind. Coming from Saul Bellow, this is no surprise. It is also a love story, though. Zetland, or Zet, a philosophy student, meets and marries—is “delightfully married” to—Lottie. Initially having “no interest in surface phenomena,” he comes to appreciate the lot of a knowing but content man. “Ah, Lottie, I’ve been starving on symbolic logic,” Zet says. There is much to be said for surface phenomena.

Contrary to what some might suspect, “Zetland” is not too cerebral. It is a rather casual serio-comedy.