Adua and Her Friends (aka "Hungry for Love") is a 1960 film from Italy, directed by Antonio Pietrangeli.
With the passage of the "Merlin Law
", brothels in Italy have been banned. As one particular brothel in Rome goes out of business, four prostitutes go into business for themselves. They are: Adua (Simone Signoret), the oldest of the bunch and basically the boss; Marilina (Emmanuelle Riva), who has a small son, and who is far more high-string and nervous than the rest; Lolita (Sandra Milo), the youngest and sexiest of the group, and also the dumbest as she has entrusted most of her money to a con artist; and Milly (Gina Rovere), sort of the Hufflepuff House of the group.
The four women pool their savings and acquire a dilapidated old building on Rome's outskirts. The general idea is to start a restaurant that will be a cover for their continuing prostitution activities upstairs, but at least sex work that they'll be doing for themselves rather than for a pimp. However, because they're prostitutes with police records, they are denied a restaurant license. They turn to one of their old clients, wealthy Ercoli, who agrees to back their venture...provided that they pay him a million lira a month from their profits.
Marcello Mastroianni plays Piero, a sleazy used-car salesman who takes a fancy to Adua.
Tropes:
- As You Know: An ugly fight between Adua and Marilina early in the film includes Adua screeching "You even had a baby!" to Marilina. This sets up the arrival of Marilina's little boy later in the film, as she has brought him back from boarding school now that she's no longer in sex work.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Adua has a deeply satisfying moment in which she exposes Ercoli as the slimy pimp that he is in front of an entire restaurant full of people. This is followed by Ercoli wreaking terrible revenge: not only having all four women arrested for prostitution, but arranging for a story to be published in the paper, publicly humiliating all of them and destroying their chances for respectable lives.
- Downer Ending: Ercoli forecloses on the restaurant, destroying the four women's dreams of success. He also has a newspaper article run just to shame them. Marilina has to send her boy away again. Milly loses her chance at marriage and happiness with Stefano. And Adua is left a lonely streetwalker, which is even grimmer considering how old she already is.
- Eek, a Mouse!!: A lizard, not a mouse, but Lolita completely freaks when she sees a lizard in their dilapidated building, screeching for Milly to kill it.
- Face Framed in Shadow: How Adua is framed, lit only by a candle in the ramshackle building the four girls have just claimed, as she reminisces how she serviced whole lines of Italian soldiers in North Africa in World War II. The thing that haunts her isn't the gang-banging, it's that so many of those soldiers would die the very next day.
- Fanservice: The opening sequence has a lot of very sexy women lounging around a brothel in their underwear. And for the rest of the movie, Adua and her friends wear a series of tight dresses.
- Foreshadowing: A nasty fight between Adua and Marilina ends with Marilina spitting that Adua, who's older than the others (Signoret was 39), will be doomed to some cheap brothel. Later, Adua sees a possibly intoxicated, definitely wrinkled streetwalker talking to herself, and is shaken. Sure enough, the film ends with Adua a sad streetwalker.
- Gray Rain of Depression: The sad last scene has Adua, her dreams having been ruined, selling herself on the streets of Rome in the pouring rain. And if that's not sad enough, she's the only hooker on that street corner without an umbrella.
- Miss Kitty: Seen in the first scenes, an older and heavyset woman who sadly bids her girls goodbye. Seen again briefly later, as a drunk, agitated Marilina comes back to the former whorehouse and her old madam lets her stay the night.
- Moral Guardians: Not seen, but the Moral Guardians in 1958 Italy passed a law banning brothels. This had the unintended consequence of stripping prostitutes like Adua of their friends and support structures.
- My Girl Is Not a Slut: The particularly sad thing is that Stefano still wanted to marry Milly even after finding out about her past. But when the newspaper article ran and everyone else found out about her past, he dumped her.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: A pathetic Adua, all her dreams having been destroyed, trundling off down a lonely Rome street in the rain.
- Orbital Shot: A 360-degree pan around Marilina's room from Ercoli's POV has him observe everything in that room—laundry, a child's toys, sacks of potatoes—and correctly conclude that the women are not engaging in prostitution like they were supposed to.
- Streetwalker: What Adua fears beyond all else, as shown by her disturbed reaction when she sees a drunk streetwalker walking by. Sure enough, that's what she becomes in the end, muttering about how they once served eighty people and she's totally going to save up money for another restaurant, while all the other streetwalkers laugh in derision.
- Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: The exact words "too many cooks" are said when the girls do, in fact, spoil the food, after three of them independently add salt to the sauce.
- Toplessness from the Back: Part of Lolita's whole Shameless Fanservice Girl deal involves sunbathing in the nude on a second-floor balcony of the restaurant. She has to beat a hasty retreat which includes Toplessness from the Back when two customers show up.
