Digging through the annals of older films to find directors and performers who enjoyed some renown in their day but aren’t so well remembered now, can be a hit and miss affair. This one is definitely a hit twice over. Stefania Sandrelli is achingly beautiful as the lead actress in a film that seems to equate that beauty with shallowness. Antonio Pietrangeli is outstanding as a director whose images are as exquisite as the other great directors of his day and delivers a film whose sole purpose is paint a complete portrait of that character.

Adriana Astarelli is a young woman who should be in the prime of her life. She has a beautiful face, an amazing body and has accordingly moved to live in Rome to pursue a career in film. While she is waiting for her chance to shine in the limelight, she works menial jobs including in a hair and nail salon and as an usher in a cinema. In one scene, she dresses up glamorously for a modelling job but the director wants only a shot of her feet wearing boots. She pays publicists and agents to get her name out and her face in magazines to no avail. She has a succession of lovers and boyfriends, including an affair with the married owner of the salon and flamboyant rakes but none of the relationships last very long. At one point, one such boyfriend named Dario takes her on a vacation at a resort but skips out the next morning without paying so she is forced to give up her bracelet as paying. When a police inspector later summons her claiming that Dario is a thief and the bracelet was stolen, she doesn’t seem to hold any animosity towards him at all and confessing that she doesn’t know his last name asks the inspector to tell Dario to call her if he is found.

There’s pretty much no plot in this film as it consists entirely of Adriana going from one encounter to the next. It’s difficult to work out what’s going on inside her head. It would be more understandable if she were merely in it for the money, yet she does seem to have her own personal integrity of a sort. She refuses to be outright prostituted and insists that she feels something for each of the men who bed her, brief though their time together is. Fortunately director Antonio Pietrangeli outright tells us what’s up with her character through the astute observations of an older man, a novelist, who he hooks up with. He describes her as someone who lives only in the moment, with no memory of yesterday and no plan for tomorrow, so content in the simple happiness of everyday that she doesn’t notice the petty humiliations that are inflicted on her by everyone. It’s somewhat strange to limit the film so, but the whole thing is very much an in-depth psychological profile of Adriana, though it can be said that she is used to signify the “go-go years” of Italy at the time, with its liberal sexual mores and the shallow glamorousness of its celebrity culture.

Yet even Adriana’s shield of obliviousness doesn’t last forever. When she eagerly participates in a promotional video and the producer edits the sequence to make her look like a dumb bimbo, making her a laughingstock. At some point, her insistence on having fun without a care for what happens tomorrow takes on a desperate tinge. It’s clear that Pietrangeli intends this to be a critique of the lifestyle and the era. Not knowing anything about the state of Italian society at the time, it’s impossible to evaluate its accuracy or relevance, but it says what it has to say very well indeed. The film is beautiful with cinematography that is not inferior to the better known work by Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. It stands out though from its contemporaries by focusing on a woman’s perspective and the sharp focus on a single character.

As I noted at the beginning, I wasn’t expecting too much from this and so was totally blown away by its originality and expressive power. I’m not certain if Pietrangeli’s other films are as good as this one. It seems to be the only one that won a major award. But its existence encourages me to persevere in watching these old films because coming across something like this makes it all worth it.