Review by Beatrice On 29-May-2024
There will come a day when man will wake up from oblivion and finally understand who he really is and to whom he has handed over the reins of his existence, to a deceptive, lying mind that keeps him and holds him enslaved… Man has no limits and when one day he realizes it, he will be free even here in this world.
Rome, Fiumicino, Tiber.
Dance hall, South American music.
They dance, they go wild, they love, they look at each other, they leave.
She wants to keep drinking and dancing and accuses him of getting old.
They are mother and son.
Julio is about forty years old and still lives with her, a Colombian woman with a strong personality.
In a house by the river that looks like a bazaar, colorful and full of things, he sleeps upstairs, but the mother does not hesitate to reach him to tell him about the violent dreams she has at night.
They play, joke, insult each other, and he tries to contain her.
They cut drugs, deal them, he secretly snorts, goes with prostitutes whom he pays with drugs, she smokes cocaine in front of her annoyed son.
At night, they hit a dog with their car, and the mother wants it buried while showing no pity for the suffering drug "mule" who arrives at their house in dire health conditions.
They go to the doctor together; both have significant ailments.
If someone tries to distance him, the mother does not allow it; she does not accept any intrusions, especially emotional ones.
Julio has to sneak out like a teenager, without being seen or heard: the overbearing and undisciplined mother threatens him with a gun and insults Ines, the young "mule" who stayed in the house before leaving for Colombia.
They work for a friend/dealer in the area who invites them to a vulgar lunch with all the other friends.
Julio is very reserved; the mother is overbearing, and although he loves her, he watches her with suspicion.
A big argument separates them; he leaves, the mother insults him, calls him an idiot, and confesses it would have been better to abort than to bring him into the world.
When he returns, everything has changed, and nothing will be the same as before.
A funeral, a cremation, a letter, a mystery never to be revealed.
A journey, a life, loneliness, fear.
Between Caribbean music and Latin electronics by Nicolas Jaar, a corner of South America is recreated on the banks of the Tiber, amidst decay, alienation, love, and disturbance.
The rhythm of the story is pressing:
The film, says the director, is a love story between a mother and a son, a colorful tragedy that sinks its heroes into the changing hues of their most intimate moods, in delicacy and violence. It is the almost mythological tale of a bond based on blood that I have tried to remove from judgment, without wanting to determine whether what deeply unites the two protagonists is an act of love, stronger than social conventions, or a dysfunctional psychic act that demonstrates the impossibility of accepting a natural separation. Can we really draw a line that distinguishes love and madness, the irreducible strength of feeling from the deep fear of being alone forever?
Artale tells a mysterious and symbiotic love story, made of complicity and distrust, exaggeration and subtraction, indissolubility and noise, oppression and subjection.
The mother holds the reins of a life taken away from the world, hidden from emancipation, manipulated, and subdued, perhaps due to incapacity, mostly due to impossibility.
The darkness that pervades the woman's biography and breaks in like a twist confirms Julio's childish naivety in his inability to question himself and the world and in his repeated and utterly unconscious removal mechanism.
The painful and indolent reality that permeates Roman life contrasts with the lively and rather emotional Colombian vitality, constructing the identity of an experience composed of a common yet different language to express itself, coexist, hybridize, and survive.
A strong melodramatic tension accompanies the story of bodies balancing between pleasure and sacrifice: the castrating mother and the desiring son: Julio has been hope and illusion, strength and weakness.
The chime of a freedom to be pursued and feared, between playing the game and claiming one's space of rebellion and life.
A necessary and impossible path of growth, albeit late and inevitable: a body to be transformed, investigated, elaborated, metabolized.
It is more difficult to maintain the balance of freedom than to endure the weight of tyranny.
29-May-2024 by Beatrice