Adua and her Friends (1960)

Release Date: May 31st, 2011
Distributor: Raro Video
MSRP: $29.98
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Year: 1960
Language: Italian (with English subtitles)
Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli

I'm not completely sure of how to start this review off, so I'll just get straight to the point. Adua and Her Friends is a rather average Italian Neorealist film. It starts off with interesting enough characters and an interesting enough conflict. But as it continues, the excitement presented within the first forty-five minutes dives down, and down, and down, to the point where I could care less about what's happening on screen, and ends up being a group of characters whining to each other without much significance.
Adua and Her Friends opens on the closing day of a rather popular brothel. Adua and her three friends set out to pursue a career more respectable than prostitution, they decide to open a restaurant. Already we see that the four "friends" have trouble dealing with each other; they constantly bicker, complain, and forget fairly vital assets for opening their business. For instance, Adua forgets to pay for water and gas, she forgets to carry any real vegetables or fruits except for apples and lettuce, and the list goes on. Lacking any license or proper permit to run such a business, they are given the chance to get permission to run the restaurant as long as they run their business as well on the second floor of the building. And as the regrets of their past, and dissatisfaction with the present, they all start to fall apart.
I left out a few key points in the summary above, mainly because they really aren't any points of interest, or at least to me during the film. There are interwoven love stories with a couple of the girls, as well as one of them dealing with her child (who comes in more than half way through the movie). It's subplots like this that bring this movie down. Adding more problems to the characters' lives does not add to the characters themselves. A majority of the scenes that take place during the second of the movie (and even during the first) seem like they're there to only lengthen the movie out. Though I really enjoyed the dialogue spoken in the movie, there are too many points where it goes too far; many conversations amount to nothing.Certain characters could, and should have been cut out. The scenes which fit into the love story sub-plots become more and more frequent through the second half, as we get tastes of other characters and sub-plots that most likely would have been more interesting and progressive to the story itself. In one scene, an old customer arrives at the restaurant with his family, and pulls Adua back to talk to her and assure she's still in business. It's scummy characters like this that I would have loved to see more of. Along with that, the girls themselves never really came off as friends. Throughout the film all they do is bicker at each other, rarely do we ever see them enjoying themselves, or at least showing some sort of chemistry between one another; their friendship is just so forced.
Overall, it's an interesting movie none the less. I would give this a 5, but there are certain things in the first half that bring it up slightly so I would rate this at a low 6/10. It's no Mama Roma. As for the DVD, the image looks great, the audio is alright, the quality varies from scene to scene. Check it out if you're a fan of Italian Neorealism, it's worth at least one viewing.