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Rating: "zero ambitions, no morals, not even for money because she is not even a whore... for her yesterday and tomorrow do not exist, she doesn't even live day by day because even that would force her into plans that are too complicated, so she lives minute by minute, sunbathing, listening to records, and dancing are her only activities while for the rest she is fickle, inconsistent, always in need of new and brief encounters, it doesn't matter with whom... never with herself..."
In this film from '65, the story of Adriana is told, a girl portrayed by a magnificent Stefania Sandrelli, in the role of a ditsy, somewhat dumb girl from the provinces trying to break into the golden world of Roman showbiz. Adriana's desire to break through is not ruthless ambition but more an escape from a terrible reality, a very poor family with a disabled brother and a dead sister; fleeing, Adriana will meet characters and parasites from the vip underworld and will clash with the use men make of her: a quiet pastime or diversion.
While Adriana's superficiality and frivolousness may be irritating on the one hand, on the other she earns our sympathy, she touches us because it is her expression of her joy of living and rushing towards life, her state of mind is not so out of vacuity but to try to take things lightly, letting them slide over her just as with the characters of Manfredi, Tognazzi (superb in the role of a small-time actor now on the decline who dances himself to exhaustion to make a movie) and Enrico Maria Salerno engaged in their petty rounds: Adriana seems to fly above all this, also in search of a man who can truly love her, ending up throwing herself into countless affairs.
This nonchalance in going through her life punctuated by pop songs, sunbaths, pseudoevents, and cheap loves will at a certain point explode: magnificent is the scene in which after having amused herself in boredom and play in her apartment with Gilbert Becaud in the background, another Mina song brings back the memory of past pains, causing the heavy makeup to melt in tears. Adriana will still try to avoid all this, but suddenly she will drop the mask, revealing all her fragility and shattering her dreams.
In crafting this female portrait, Pietrangeli does not follow linearity but the line of thoughts, memories, and associations: an object leads us to another situation, a song makes us remember a loved one, a name takes us back to a childhood village party and leads us to a reflection on the changes brought about by the economic boom that crushes people. It is all done in a more than antidramatic manner, I would say harsh, through the association of typical songs of the period that rather than trivializing manage to bring out the bitterness of the protagonist, who through Sandrelli's portrayal manages to bring out the notes of complexity and sadness of Adriana without sinking her into a heap of banality.
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By RIBALDO
A splendid and very bitter portrait of a pioneer of the current little-letter girls-dolls-tramps who, 50 years later, still flit between luxury, money, and power.
The film, which lasts 125 minutes, is at times quite entertaining but is also ruthlessly cynical and pushes to the threshold of the grotesque with some rather... psychedelic sequences.
