Critics reviews

The great Ettore Scola collaborated on the script, which is full of Godardian insights into the ways that cultural experience affect personal identity. Antonio Pietrangeli's direction is a little modish, indulging in flashy stylistic flourishes clearly inspired by the Nouvelle Vague; in hindsight, though, the stylization makes sense, as it reflects Adriana's enthrallment to the zeitgeist.

One of the greatest Italian films for a great period of Italian films, I Knew Her Well is also an ideal introduction to the cinema of Antonio Pietrangeli, located somewhere at the intersection of neorealism, commedia all-italiana and modern all'Antonioni.

Sandrelli was all of 19 years old in 1965, and has a slightly unformed quality here that makes Adriana a poignant figure even when her intentions and motives are hard to pin down. Her performance fits beautifully within Pietrangeli's offbeat structure, which deliberately downplays moments of significance. No scene seems explicitly designed to convey information; anything we learn about Adriana emerges almost incidentally.

Antonio Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well deserves to take its place in the canon of classic cinema that defined Italy in the 1960s, alongside such films as Federico Fellini's La dolce vita,Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse, and Dino Risi's Il sorpasso. Like those others, it describes the country at a moment of crucial transformation—a period of economic boom in which a poor agrarian society found itself becoming a richer, urban one.

Mr. Pietrangeli's New Wave-inflected, choppily fast-forwarding style depicts Adriana as a kind of unattached Emma Bovary, sometimes clearheaded, sometimes empty-headed. Ms. Sandrelli, in a variety of wigs and costumes, is never less than hypnotically beautiful. Mr. Pietrangeli's perspective could be said to split the difference between the analytic detachment of early-60s Antonioni and the political anger of late-60s/early-70s Bertolucci.

The process of fabricating a glowing persona can be glimpsed from in Antonio Pietrangeli's superbly crafted I Knew Her Well... Pietrangeli collapses his film with the star-making apparatus in subtle ways: the film's opening camera movements, which trace Sandreli's curves while sunbathing, are repeated by a newsreel crew that interviews her while she's lounging on a bed at a party.

As New Wavey as can be, Pietrangeli abruptly vaults through Adriana's existence with a series of context-obliterating shock cuts; a pregnancy is discussed and then vanishes, and scenes begin in the beds of strange men, all to a crammed soundtrack of obliviously silly Italian pop. A generation-defining movie in Italy, I Knew Her Well is that rare saga of the never-was, immersed, like its heroine, in daydreams, numb to its own heartbreak.

Antonio Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well plays like a mix between Fellini's oneiric mid-'60s films and the kitchen-sink realism of the British New Cinema. Like Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, it utilizes a fragmented, flashback narrative structure to play with spatiotemporal particulars and prevents a neat chronology from taking shape.

The last film Pietrangeli completed, "I Knew Her Well" is his most astonishing and tragic.

A bittersweet comedy (1965) from Italian director Antonio Pietrangeli (The Visit); it reinforced Sandrelli's popular screen image as the innocent broken by cruel social reality (cf Germi's Seduced and Abandoned) and also Pietrangeli's reputation as an antichauvinist director (his female characters are more than humorous foils) working in a strongly chauvinist genre.