Happiness: the accomplished experience of all fulfillment.

Desirè is a hairdresser on film sets, has a childish attitude and gives in passively to the harassment that many men direct at her. Her brother Claudio suffers from major depression, and their parents are manipulative, themselves mentally unstable and consequently unable to help their children. Desiré's love will lead her brother to a path of healing and perhaps happiness.

What is happiness for Ramazzotti? Being oneself, fulfilling one's needs without social and familial constraints, self-defining oneself, freeing oneself from parental desires, independently choosing one's own path. Being able to enact all this for many is a natural life path, for others a long and painful odyssey made up of confrontations, sadness, passivity, aggression.

Micaela Ramazzotti in her debut feature builds a film indebted not only to the cinema she made as an actress but also to a lot of fierce Italian comedy (the monologue of Max Tortora's character with the consequent dance in front of the film crew that makes fun of him, recalls a scene from Pietrangeli's "Io la conoscevo bene," where Ugo Tognazzi underwent a similar thing).

After an unnerving beginning, where one struggles to understand the superficial behaviors of the protagonist and where the film's tones are purely comic, "Happiness" continues to maintain comedic connotations, but soiling itself with an everyday atrocity that strikes the stomach.

Petit-bourgeois apartments.

Christmas lunch with codfish.

Depression seen as something not real because the real illness is like that of the neighbor on the landing who has been emptied out but the nasty ailment has reoccurred.

Bourgeois ambitions that break all ethics.

Racism, the hypocrisy of a homophobic father who jerks off a TV producer in exchange for a contract.

Desirè as a child forced to be touched by her uncle for a week's vacation at a seedy seaside resort in Lazio.

The ignorance and blindness of a generation in turn deformedly educated.

The inheritance of evil that will find a breaking point in the tragicomic figure of the protagonist, whose annoying initial behaviors we will also understand.

The emotional dependence both of couples and between parents and children.

"Happiness" sticks the average Italian family and hits hard with a film as out of tune, flawed and stilted as Ramazzotti's acting and as the characters in the film. Out of tune, imperfect and shaky is life.

Most painful is the alternating montage that shows us Claudio undergoing electroshock while his parents are at a dance hall singing and dancing to Carrá's "Felicitá."

Claudio, after a course of psychiatric treatment, will probably catch the train of his life, while the film closes on the face of Desirè who, on the other hand, still has not found her own happiness.

"Let's pretend that

Happiness

Happiness

Tarattá."

End, dark in the theater.

How many lines and dialogues have we heard like those in the film? How many parents like Claudio's and his sister's have we met? So many, unfortunately

14-Sep-2023 by Ema