The first merit of Le Amiche is to be important as a film in itself, as a film of Michelangelo Antonioni himself, independent of Tra donne sole. The observation of the costume business, which for Pavese had a purely material constructional value as a lyric and moral definition, here comes into the foreground, as suits the task of cinema, and as is in conformity with the vocation of the bitter observer of a bourgeois generation, a view formulated with such coherence in his previous films and here brought to its most complete expression. It is the first time in cinema that we see the life of a group of petit-bourgeois friends, male and female, the hysteria and the acridities which ferment under the superficial laughter: a whole world which has already its literary tradition, but which the cinema till now has not touched upon, used as it is to handling more easily strongly contrasted incidents, individual exploits, with the chiaroscuro of life. With his spare and bitter way of story telling, he has based it on links of landscapes, always a little squalid and bleak, with bursts of dialogue, intermittent and almost casual, a cinematographic style which corresponds to the lesson of understatement of so many modern writers, Pavese among them. The merit of his film is to have seen this world with a regard which is sensitive and yet without indulgence (without the nostalgic-twilight frills of Fellini’s I vitelloni), remorselessly exposing the fragmentary cruelty, the superficial sensuality, the continual cowardice in face of the most tense moral situations, and above all not to be limited to this descriptive operation of the costume business, but to counterpoint with it another rhythm of life, another reason and bond, that of work, whether it is to direct a de luxe fashion house or to handle bricks and mortar, as long as it is a matter of realising personal potential in things accomplished (…).

Italo Calvino, “Le amiche” e Pavese (lettera aperta a Michelangelo Antonioni), “Notiziario Einaudi”, November-December 1955