Io la conoscevo bene aka I Knew Her Well (1965) Italian Caffèlatte Noir

Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli

Written by Antonio Pietrangeli, Ruggero Maccari, and Ettore Scola, and based on a story also by the same trio. The Cinematography was by Armando Nannuzzi (Waterloo). Music by Piero Piccioni and Benedetto Ghiglia. 

The film stars Stefania Sandrelli (Seduced and Abandoned, The Conformist, Stealing Beauty) as Adriana Astarelli, Mario Adorf (Station Six Sahara, Major Dundee, The Red Tent, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Tin Drum) as Emilio Ricci, aka Bietolone, Jean-Claude Brialy as Dario Marchionni, Joachim Fuchsberger as The Writer, Nino Manfredi as Cianfanna, Enrico Maria Salerno as Roberto, Ugo Tognazzi (La Cage aux Folles)  as Gigi Baggini, Karin Dor as Barbara, the lady friend of Adriana, Franco Fabrizi as Paganelli, Turi Ferro as Il commissario. Robert Hoffmann as Antonio Marais, Franco Nero (Django, The Mercenary, Companeros, Django Unchained) as Italo - The garage attendant.

Stefania Sandrelli as Adriana

Mario Adorf  as Emilio Ricci, aka Bietolone

Ugo Tognazzi as Gigi Baggini

Franco Nero as Italo

Adriana when we first meet her is a young girl who lives in Rome and works as a hairdresser / beautician in Ostia. She ran away from home to be a big star. We get her story in time jumps and flashbacks as Adriana remembers them.

Ostia for Rome, is the equivalent of Coney Island, The Rockaways or Long Beach for New York City. Or Santa Monica and Venice Beach for Los Angeles. The beaches where the masses go to cool off.

Adriana a blonde at this time spends her off time on the beach listening to her radio and sunning herself. Apparently part of requirements as an employee is to lay on the mattress in the back room and be diddled by the owner who arrives at the end of the day to also collect the shops profits. 

We watch as Adriana calmly reads "Demonaik #4 an adult comic paperback about a mad scientist and the club of the serpents, while out of the frame a pink serpent finds it hole. The shop owner grabs the book and flings it to the floor. 

We cut to an older Adriana "moonlighting" as an usherette at the Eurcine theater. She has a low rent agent that gets her some advertising gigs. We get a brief sequence of Adriana riding around the city on a Fabbri armchair that is attached to a car roof.

This gig leads to a cheap double dates with the Fabbri driver and his buddy and Adriana with one of her usherette gal pals. They dance to a blaring car radio under the headlights at the end of the nearest dead end road. A de facto "lovers lane." 

Her "date" doesn't own the car so she's making out in the grass with her boy toy du jour. That date was more memorable because on the way back they came upon an auto accident between a bicyclist and a truck pulling horses. The horses are visibly skittish.

We cut Adriana's agents shithole office located in an apartment flat. The place is festooned  with photos that are taped to the walls. 8x10's of all his previous clientele. 

The agent is there with a fixer Cianfanna who offers Adriana crumbs for the money she pays him. Her next gig is a Miss Castellamare contest down in Naples. 

She gets fixed up by Cianfanna with Dario who supposedly has connections, but his idea of a date is skinny-dipping in the Bay of Naples and then making love in Dario's hotel room. The next morning Dario has skipped out and she is left with the hotel bill.

Dario and Adriana

Her next gig for Cianfanna is modeling but it turns out it's only leg modeling for a line of boots. After that she is at a boxing match. She is the between rounds entertainment as model for clothes. 

Cianfanna fixes her up again with a "connection' but this time she refuses and walks off. She meets the boxer Emilio "Bietolone" who lost the match. 

They walk together to the train station reflecting on their lives. Adrian has a flashback to the poverty stricken home she left. 

We also get glimpses of the other affaires particularly with a writer and with Italo her parking garage mechanic.

She gets a small part in a peplum film and acquires an older friend Barbara who is a sort of "advisor" / escort service "madame" for young women such as herself who want to break into the big time. 

Filming a "Peplum" a "Sword & Sandal" film

It starts to really go Noirsville when Antonio, who she really likes, uses her as a go between on a phone call to the girl, he tells her, that he is "really in love with," then at a big party a has been actor Bagini tried to procure her for the big movie star Roberto. who wants to spend the night with her. 

Noirsville

Director Pietrangeli using a bold narrative structure slowly builds up Adriana's disillusions with brief biographical sequences connected by various visual elements that reflect previous ones. Its like the equivalent of a multi angled cubist portrait of Adriana. 7/10

"Ok Stefania flip over we are ready to shoot scene one." - How Noir of her...

FILM SHEET

Over the decades, the narrative and visual modernity of the film has been noted several times, constructed in a series of very daring time jumps, with inserts of short flashbacks, and sequence shots bordering on virtuosity. […] The assumption of this fragmented model is first of all an element of proximity to the protagonist, of rendering of her time and space, of getting closer thanks also to the use of the zoom and the glances into the camera, which a couple of times are useful to introduce flashbacks to the past, but not only that. Her gaze lingers on the camera, fleetingly, even in other moments such as when she is overcome by disappointment over the behavior of one of her lovers (the one who makes her call her girlfriend) and above all in the intense 'suspended' scene in which Adriana she is at home alone, and looks out the window while Sergio Endrigo's Mani bucate plays on the record player. A three-minute long sequence shot, one of the most powerful scenes of the film and of all Italian cinema of the time, which fully shows the union of cinematic modernity and dialogue with its cinema system. In that scene Stefania Sandrelli looks into the camera like Anna Karina in This is my life (1962) by Jean-Luc Godard, and she is actually looking at us, she is looking at the (male) spectators of the Italian comedy.

Together with the use of flashback and long-shot, the third fundamental element of the film's perspective (and certainly not the least important) is the use of songs. The film is practically always accompanied by music, sometimes original music by Piero Piccioni, but more often Italian and foreign songs, mostly coming from sound sources on stage: jukeboxes, orchestras, radios. The centrality of music must have been present right from the conception of the film (the initial subject was titled The Turntable at a certain point), but the flashback construction and the presence of songs was progressively accentuated in the subsequent drafting phases. The entire film is constructed in many moments in total symbiosis with the music. The songs are part of the protagonist's world, of her illusions; but they are also part of the body of the film.

Emiliano Morreale, Arthouse cinema of the sixties, Il Castoro, Milan 2011