Antonio Pietrangeli's cinema is a sociological investigation conducted with a camera, and Adua and Her Friends is perhaps the most lucid and bitter example of this. The film opens with a national trauma disguised as progress: the Merlin Law of 1958. Pietrangeli, assisted by a team of screenwriters who are the history of Italian comedy (Age, Scarpelli, Scola, Maccari), does not film the “liberation” of women from brothels; he films an eviction. He captures the exact moment when the Italian state, in the midst of the Economic Miracle, decides to legislate on morality, sweeping the dust (and the women) under the carpet of the new bourgeois respectability. The prostitutes are not redeemed, they are simply relocated. The film follows four of these women, Adua (Simone Signoret), Marilina (Emmanuelle Riva), Lolita (Sandra Milo), and Milly (Gina Rovere), at the moment when their world, however regulated and protected, ceases to exist.

Their project is the beating heart of the film: to use their life savings to make the definitive leap. They want to become entrepreneurs. Their dream is not abstract; it is the tangible dream of boom-time Italy. They want to open a trattoria outside Rome, a clean, honest place where they can serve “tripe and zampone.” This attempt at integration is Pietrangeli's central thesis. The trattoria is their application for citizenship in the new bourgeois order. The first half of the film adopts the tone of a comedy. The four women, different in temperament and aspirations, create a pragmatic female solidarity. They try to learn a new trade, argue over the choice of tablecloths, and move awkwardly in the shoes of “respectable ladies.” Pietrangeli observes this attempt with deep, almost affectionate empathy, showing their hope of being able to buy redemption, of being able to recycle ‘dirty’ money into a “clean” business.

The cast is an extraordinary assembly of female archetypes that transcend comedy. Simone Signoret, fresh from her international acclaim with La strada dei quartieri alti, gives Adua a tragic gravitas; she is the weary leader, the only one who truly understands what is at stake, her desperate search for normality palpable. She is counterbalanced by Emmanuelle Riva (fresh from the much more abstract experience of Hiroshima mon amour), who gives Marilina a neurotic fragility, a broken woman who is only trying to get her son back. Sandra Milo, perfect in the role of Lolita, embodies the most superficial version of the dream: she does not desire redemption, she desires the symbols of redemption (marriage, appliances, outward respectability). Finally, Gina Rovere is the popular soul, the pragmatic and disenchanted Roman. Their interaction is a microcosm of the tensions running through the country: the desire to forget and the impossibility of doing so.

The film makes a masterful tonal shift when the dream meets bureaucratic reality. To open the trattoria, the women need a front man, a ‘clean’ man who will vouch for them. They find him in the mellifluous Ercoli (a perfect Claudio Gora), an accountant who is the embodiment of the new speculative class. Ercoli is the true antithesis of the women: he is the respectable face of hypocrisy. And here Pietrangeli's criticism becomes ruthless. The Italy of the Economic Miracle, the same Italy that has marginalized them, is ready to welcome them back on one condition: that they go back to doing what they know how to do. When the restaurant, against all odds, becomes successful, the deal with the devil is presented. Ercoli and the old pimps don't want a restaurant; they want an illegal brothel upstairs. Society does not want their redemption; it wants their function, as long as it is hidden behind the clean facade of the restaurant.

Pietrangeli is perhaps the only director of his generation to have placed the female condition at the absolute center of his work, not as an object of desire (à la Fellini) or as a symbol (à la Antonioni), but as a sociological subject. Compared to the contemporary Rocco and His Brothers, where prostitution is a whirlpool of melodramatic degradation, Pietrangeli adopts an almost documentary-like gaze. There is no complacency in the downfall of his protagonists. Their defeat is not due to moral weakness or an inevitable fate; it is a systemic failure. It is Italian society, bigoted and capitalist, that rejects their request for integration. The hypocrisy is not only that of the men who were once their clients and now pretend not to recognize them, but that of an entire economic system that does not know what to do with four women who just want to stop being commodities.

The film's conclusion is one of the most bitter and desperate in Italian cinema. Female solidarity, the only force that held the group together, crumbles under the weight of economic blackmail and disappointment. Each woman deals with failure in her own way, but for all of them it is a return to square one, or worse. The final shot of Adua, walking alone in the night on the Via Appia, literally returning to the sidewalk from which she started, is the closing of a perfect and terrible circle. The Merlin Law, created with “civilizing” intentions, has failed. It has simply transformed a protected system into savage exploitation. Pietrangeli shows us that, in boom-time Italy, there is no place for redemption. There is only room for business, and sex, for these women, is the only business that society allows them to conduct.