Along the way to becoming Antonioni

THE “Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni” series, which continues this weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, presents more of the director’s early work, along with a new documentary: “Being With Michelangelo,” made by his wife, Enrica Fico Antonioni, and screening Saturday with the Antonionis in attendance.

Along with “Il Grido” and the well-known 1961 film “La Notte,” the series will provide a rare opportunity to see “La Signora Senza Camelie” (The Lady Without Camellias) and “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends). The latter two films, along with Antonioni’s first feature, “Cronaca di un Amore,” form an informal trilogy focusing on women’s lives. The level of accomplishment of these three movies cannot be over-stressed in light of the more famous films to come, and they are arguably more satisfying than some of his more experimental works. They are all shot in black and white, and are of the utmost elegance and assurance.

“Le Amiche” (1955) stars the regal Eleonora Rossi Drago as a young woman returning from Rome to her hometown of Turin, where she is overseeing the opening of a fashion salon she is to manage. By chance she is checked into connecting hotel rooms with a rich local girl whose suicide attempt draws Rossi Drago’s character into the girl’s circle of friends. At first she is delighted to be included by a group of the city’s elite, for she was born poor and is self-made, but eventually realizes she is caught up in a nest of vipers. As in “Cronaca di un Amore,” Antonioni reveals the vapidity of life among the upper bourgeois and the difficulty for a woman who has risen above her class but accepts the possibility of life with a man who can offer considerably more love than money.

“Le Amiche” has an astonishing sequence in which the girlfriends and their men restlessly stroll the beach, which anticipates and may well be the equal to virtuoso visual moments in Antonioni films to come. The constant shifting of camera placement and angles seems intuitively to capture the tensions and uncertainties between the couples and the women themselves in such a breathtaking manner as to suggest that this sequence represents a breakthrough in Antonioni’s discovery of the potential of his medium to express interior lives.

“Cronaca’s” exquisite Lucia Bose returns in “La Signora Senza Camelie” (1953) as a onetime shopgirl catapulted to movie stardom only to find herself maneuvered into marriage by her forceful producer (Andrea Checchi), who promptly insists his unpretentious, untrained wife be cast in a predictably disastrous film of “Joan of Arc.” In her unhappiness and innocence she is vulnerable to a suave Lothario (Ivan Desny). Antonioni casts a cold eye at the seedier side of Cinecitta and, in doing so, also creates a bitter commentary on the status of women -- or rather the lack of same -- in the 1950s.

Hollywood tough guy Steve Cochran was prouder of his work in the superb, somber “Il Grido” (1957) than anything else he ever did. Cochran plays a poor man who is wandering through Italy’s Po Valley on a fruitless search to replace a lost love, while Betsy Blair is a former girlfriend who takes him in. Cochran is remarkable in this study of unrequited love. After a trio of films on the lives of privileged, urban women, “Il Grido” recalls the neo-realist concerns for the poor of Antonioni’s early documentaries, “The People of the Po,” but expressed with his unique visual power.

Korean festival

The second annual Los Angeles Korean International Film Festival, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Egyptian Theatre, opens with Park Chul-soo’s “Green Chair,” a torrid love story inspired by an actual incident. It opens in hectic fashion as a police inspector crudely lectures a 32-year-old woman, Mun-hee (Seo Jeong), sentenced to 100 hours of social work for having sex with 19-year-old Hyun (Shim Ji-ho) 28 days before attaining his majority.

Upon release from court, they flee reporters and end up running off together for five days of lovemaking -- not hard core but definitely NC-17. At this point the couple embark upon discovering if lust can turn into love, and Park, having given his actors the confidence to bare their bodies, now inspires them to reveal the lovers’ souls as they grapple with the possibility of a long-term relationship.

Park is thankfully not without humor, always a plus when tackling grand passion, and his finale is filled with hypocrisy-demolishing hilarity.

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Screenings

Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni

* “Le Amiche” and “Il Grido”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

* “Being With Michelangelo” and “La Notte”: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

* “La Signora Senza Camelie”: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 23

Where: LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 857-6010, www.lacma.org

Los Angeles Korean International Film Festival

* “Green Chair”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM, www.lakiff.com