Memory, search, revelation, and self-discovery are at the core of Mario Martone’s last movie before the presentation of his new film “I vesuviani” at the Venice Biennale 1997. The director privileges the use of the flashback to render the relentless shift between present, recent past, and remote past. Passages between scenes are markedly brusque and reflect the harshness of the story represented. In the best tradition of dramatic thriller, Martone produces suspense, and yet dispels it at every turn since the pieces of evidence given to the spectator rarely make up a coherent narrative. Fractures, fissures, misunderstandings, lost opportunities characterize a story that goes beyond the thriller mode and roams into the meanders of the psyche. Set in a noisy and car-jammed Naples whose dissonant modern architecture mirrors the psychological conflicts of the protagonists, the movie relies on a troubling, and yet captivating, cacophony at various levels: people shouting, car honks, loud laughter are the background to a complex set of events. The movie opens up with images from the remote past, when Delia was a young girl and her mother Amalia used to work as a seamstress while her father was a painter. At the end of the introductory credits, Delia is caught in the act of writing, somehow anticipating her future occupation as a cartoon designer. No surprise then that in the next scene she is sitting at her drawing table in Bologna, engrossed in her working, when she receives a series of mysterious calls from her mother, whom Delia was expecting for a visit. Amalia’s body is found dead along the shore the next day. The event takes Delia back to Naples, the town she only marginally belongs to by now (it is interesting to notice how her initial use of standard Italian is gradually lost in the movie by resorting to dialect and local expressions during her stay in town). Delia gradually starts to gather pieces of information regarding her mother’s late movements, and thanks to a chatty and curious neighbor and a half-reticent rasping uncle, she realizes that her mother had a lover. The mysterious man is an old acquaintance of the family, as a matter of fact, and Delia sets out to find out more. Yet, the more she inquires into her mother’s life, the more she plunges into the past, her own past, trying to make sense of buried wounds and forgotten tensions. The smooth surface of the present is shattered and Delia willingly, yet cautiously, dives into the subconscious, a process that is beautifully translated on the visual level by the use of stairs and elevators. The shift between present and past (the childhood days and the day of her mother’s death) is not just horizontal, but also vertical, and the movement from different spatial levels establishes the complex architecture of the movie. Memories are not pleasant and often take place in dark corners, along stairs rails, in the solitude of elevators, in the dusky recesses of basements or in crowded public means of transportation. Movement, vertical or horizontal, in space or in time, reigns in the movie, yet never to create harmonious shifts, but to emphasize a sense of growing discomfort. The transition between present and past is often too mechanically symmetrical (from the modern bus to the old coach, for example), but plays a functional role as a parallel to an increasing symmetry that is established, at times forced, between Delia and Amalia. The two women represent two conflicting characters, and even their names signify this difference: Delia comes from Delos, the birthplace of Artemis, hunting goddess, while Amalia means “industrious” in Greek. Yet, the talkative and over-solicitous mother as opposed to the reserved and determined daughter gradually start merging in the overt parallelism of their lives (sexual intercourse with men from the same family, hatred for an abusive father/husband, rejection of imposed roles). This coincidence is narratively marked by Delia’s decision to undertake her mother’s path in reverse (chronologically speaking) and experience her “immoral” (as her affair with Caserta is generally perceived to be) desires and temptations. Also on the visual level, Delia’s choice to put on her mother’s dresses invests her quest with a symbolic meaning, reaching its peak in the realization of the twisted secret of the story while wearing Amalia’s last outfit. This identification culminates in the closure of the movie. Similar to her mother before dying (or rather deciding to die) Delia emanates a sense of liberation: on the train (another parallelism) she nonchalantly accepts a sip of beer from a stranger’s can while she graphically distorts her mother’s image on her ID card and makes her look like herself. Interestingly enough even the names of the two women sound alike, the gossipy neighbor remarks their likeness, and the uncle keeps on confusing the two names. After all, confusion enwraps the whole movie and although the mysterious plot is finally disentangled in a scene of powerful interpretation by an intense Anna Bonaiuto, the linear trajectory of the plot becomes marginal since it is the search into one’s perversions and deviations that has surfaced. And yet, nothing is presented with a moralizing attitude or with visual voyeurism even when the content of the scene might have given the opportunity to indulge in it. Martone leaves room for inference, deduction, and reconstruction. This might in fact explain some poor reviews that the movie has received, due to its complexity, which is often seen as superfluous. Martone doesn’t foster useless disorientation, rather presents human relationships as a web of entangled threads whose pattern is scarcely discernible, yet nonetheless painful, if not lacerating. Like Delia (she always wears glasses), we are left with a blurred vision of images and events: sight can deceive, and this movie, although cinema is a visual form of arts par excellence is able to provide space for lack of vision where music (the soundtrack is an interesting collage of pieces), dialect (a choice that hinders interpretation even for Italian viewers), words from the TV in the background (Naples at the time of political election when Mussolini’s niece was running), and elliptical forms of narrative development “harass” a linear unraveling and comprehension of the film. Nonetheless, the conclusion dissipates some of the gloomy fears and terrors of the story and portrays an already determined woman, now fortified by the discovery of her mother’s strength and volition, her rebellion against violence and threat as organizing principles of family life, her rebuff of moral restrictions, i.e. her search for personal freedom outside the confines of societal regulations. A fatal choice for herself, yet one that hasn’t gone unnoticed to the one who had the stubbornness to look beyond blurred images, and related mysteries.Teresa Fiore
Antonio Porta site
Verdicchio/Parentheses
ZERO...Writing Arts
AICW Parentheses Verdicchio
GUERNICA EDITIONS Publisher
RITMO ... Italian Hip Hop...Tarantamuffin
