A beautiful young woman glides through life bewitching the men around her in Antonio Pietrangeli’s
I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene). Stefania Sandrelli, a knockout in real life who won a beauty contest and went to Rome to become a film star, plays Adriana Astarelli (similarly alliterative names surely no coincidence), a beauty following the same route but falling into every trap along the way.
Pietrangeli’s camera first finds Adriana lying topless on her front in the sun on the beach, glides up her legs and over her buttocks before following Adriana back to the beauty salon where she is meant to be working. By the time she gets back there we have the measure of the young woman – sexy, outgoing, friendly, cute and charming – in an Italy of wide open spaces, light, pop music and burgeoning freedom.
In snapshots, or bulletins from a life, with a changing hairstyle often marking the changes in her circumstances, Pietrangeli charts Adriana’s course through life like a version of Vanity Fair. Adriana may not have the guile of Becky Sharp but she’s better looking, and it’s her looks that take her places rather than her wits. One moment she’s an usherette at a cinema, then she’s modelling footware, then parading about between bouts at a boxing match. Acting classes. A role in a sword and sandal epic. Upwards, always upwards.
Adriana drives a dinky little Fiat 500 which suits the chirpiness of the film, tonally resembling Alfie in its portrayal of a working-class hero breaking out. Adriana looks at various moments as if she’s about to address the camera directly, like Alfie did. She never does, and it’s appropriate. Whereas Michael Caine’s young Alfie was dishing it out, Adriana is on the receiving end. She lacks his self-knowledge.
Taken advantage of by men at every stage of her journey, she never really learns what the whole male/female game is about. One guy sleeps with her and takes off, leaving her to pay for the hotel room where she’s just been humped and dumped. Another gets her pregnant. Still another uses Adriana as a go-between – she thought he was interested in her.
A pretty, optimistic but simple girl’s adventures in a predatory world. The modern Italian miss. Sandrelli plays Adriana as a girl without guile, with the “go on, impress me” bored demeanour of the beautiful woman her only weapon. Adriana is out of her depth, but can’t admit it, only really connecting with people who come from the same social stratum as a herself, like the low-stakes boxer (Mario Adorf) she briefly befriends after he’s taken a terrible beating. Misery loves company.
Sandrelli recenty turned up in Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, playing the older version of the astonishing beauty the film is all about and looking pretty astonishing herself, considering she was approaching 80. What I didn’t realise watching Parthenope is how explicitly it references I Knew Her Well, playing about with its themes in much the same way that Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty played about with La Dolce Vita.
If you’re not Italian you might not know that I Knew Her Well is a big deal in Italy. It’s one of the 100 movies on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s list of films worth preserving. Billed as a comedy drama but fairly dark beneath it all, it is doing a preserving job itself – the look of Italy back then, the positivity as the country finally rebounded from the Second World War in “il boom”. It’s an Italy that is both ancient and modern, caught in exquisite modernist monochrome by Arnando Nannuzzi’s crisp and airy cinematography and buoyed up by a soundtrack full of Italian pop hits of the day.
Knowing that Sorrentino has been here means it can be watched in a whole new way. That rooftop party scene, didn’t he use that in The Great Beauty? Is this where he learned to shoot using superbly smooth camera glides? And like Sorrentino, Pietrangeli’s film relies – perhaps – too much on beauty to do the heavy lifting. Which is true of Adriana as well, of course.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
