Sardinia

During a rodeo, a red-haired young girl is looking for something and sees a red-haired woman, like herself, standing there half-naked, hobnobbing with a fat, lazy man.

She turns and walks away obviously upset. She runs to another woman.

The two women know each other, one living in disarray among chickens, horses, and shit to shovel.

An eviction notice has come for her and she has to pay 29,000 euros that she does not have.

Every night she supports herself in a club by drinking and offering "services" to passing men.

The other " the mother," Tina, who works in a large fish market, takes care of the red-haired little girl, Vittoria, who leads a wandering life in the Sardinian countryside among rocks, animals, and strange human fauna.

The 10-year-old girl is fascinated by the figure of that red-haired woman, Angelica, so fragile and instinctive, so repelling and discombobulated. The little girl often visits her, attracted to such an enigmatic and mysterious woman who sings and dances " this love cannot be touched...let me eat and drink from my mouth."

During a trip to Supramonte, Angelica grants attention peppered with cruel tales to the curious child as she describes to her what is done to crippled horses and what men want.

And one day the meeting between Angelica and Tina, who has discovered her daughter's association with this woman, reveals the fears and arcane arrangements undertaken between the two women.

The mother/daughter relationship is the central theme of the film: being a mother, not being a mother, being a daughter.

Sardinia is a kind of uterus, a rocky, impassable cavity, wonderfully rough and extreme as only maternal fecundity knows how to be: a mythological ancestral journey into the uterine fissures, devouring and nourishing.

A world, the feminine one that cannibalizes itself, unconscious of its own self-destructive and reproductive capacity; made of sterile and mysterious fecundity as in Angelica and fecund sterility functionary of the species as in Tina.

The enigma of parenthood as the core of the narrative, to describe the internalization that may or may not accompany the biological function of the parent, which thus does not necessarily coincide with biological motherhood and fatherhood, extrinsic in the capacity to care.

But here, perhaps no one is taking care of anyone but themselves; Tina who cannot resist her compulsion to be a mother despite or perhaps especially because nature has denied it to her; Angelica who can only be what she is i.e. incapable of being a mother because she had a "bitch mother like all mothers," as she puts it, or because mothers are not instinctively as a phagocitating ignorant culture has always divulged making those who did not rigidly adapt feel inadequate.

Victory who in doubt does not make one mother enough because she can have another and both.

The wonderful, deafening, blinding world of woman enslaved to motherhood turned procreative cultural industry can only eternalize a possible femininity: making herself loved for what she does not have and desired for what she is not.

But in this story the man is not there, and so liberation from this claustrophobic constraint seems possible, and the ending opens horizons of oxygenation from the constraint of the heterosexual relationship for the reconstruction of a feminine world other.

There is a need to reinvent, for good or ill, what is a mother and what is a daughter, through a rupture, a process of separation from the mother whereby the daughter acquires a substance for herself.

Only through a path of irreducible singularity, only through a new possibility of being herself, not necessarily a mother, not necessarily "incapable" of being a mother and not necessarily a daughter, must the little girl become a woman who is all of these things at once: mother, not mother, daughter; that is, she must know how to make "solitude her partner," that is, her own singularity something irreducible to that mortifying glorification of femininity that implies the humiliation of whoever possesses it.

A film manifesto of a condition and a claim to a space of one's own, to a right that has been manipulated for centuries.

A film that suffuses with a gaze that stares down horror and stands up to it and, in the irreducible consciousness of negativity, claims a new oxygenation because it announces the possibility of the best.

26-Jun-2023 by Beatrice