I Knew Her Well
I have mixed feelings about this movie, and mixed in the true sense — not half feelings, but strong feelings in conflict. On the one hand, I see this 1965 Italian film as presenting a very incomplete portrait of a woman, one tending toward cliche. It’s a sympathetic portrait, to be sure, but limited in its perception and understanding. At the same time, if you can get past that — and I can, for the most part — there’s a lot to recommend “I Knew Her Well.”
It’s a film about a young woman (Stefania Sandrelli) who wants to be an actress and lives on the fringes of the industry, getting small parts, modeling and going to parties. She is a guiltless, seemingly cheerful person who has a series of sexual liaisons with men, who see her as a decorative and somewhat likable imbecile.
Sandrelli is very good at suggesting, subtly, a process by which the cheerful exterior separates from the interior, where the young woman’s cheerfulness stops being an expression of her inner self and starts becoming a combination habit/ shield for dealing with the world and suppressing her own pain. In this way, the movie transcends its limitations.
Along the way, there are some indelible images and one unforgettable, devastating scene, in which a has-been actor (Ugo Tognazzi) is utterly degraded by a malignant film star at a glitzy party. I get the feeling that director Antonio Pietrangeli understood the has-been actor more effortlessly than he grasped the central character.
Still, this is an insightful document that recognized the strains, pitfalls and hypocrisies of the sexual revolution even as it was beginning.