If you meet the wolf take him for brother for he knows the forest

Italy 1813

So begins this film about fear:

Fear is the oldest and most intense of emotions

We all shun it and yet there is no story that is not steeped in it

A cross hangs while Horace plays hide-and-seek with his sister, and Giacomo, the older brother, says that fear moves all things.

The mother is strict, hyper-Catholic, and to fight evil and ask forgiveness for her poet son, she practices self-flagellation.

The eldest son has taken a liking to the book of Job in fact but especially to Torquato Tasso's Nature's Weeping of Qual rugiada o qual pianto and intends to write a poem to the moon, he namesake of Giacomo, just born in Leopardi's years, suffering from the same ailments, also in love with Silvia, contemplates the satellite in the darkness..

For the mother, the poem is useless and turns away from prayer; the cattle are found dead and there is talk of the beast, canis lupus.

Scaiaccia, the gypsy, arrives; he wants compensation because he is supposed to help figure out how to catch it and especially what it is, as it kills but does not feed on the prey while everyone is terrified by this presence and there are those who seek refuge in faith, superstitions, weapons, but there is much more.

"It will not be enough for you to pray," says the gypsy, "carve this symbol on your door, the meats cannot be eaten, they must be burned," and at the count's house, where the countess claims Scaiaccia is a pagan and must be removed, there is no playing in the ancestral home and from the upper floors come constant noises and there is a painting of an ancestor appearing and disappearing

Countessino Giacomo reads Henry Boguet with his theses on witchcraft, and after an outing in the village by the whole family, where the eldest son has grown closer to the peasant girl Silvia, the mother returns to her business of self-flagellation in front of the crucifix, with lighted candles.

The gypsy proselytizes and sells talismans while the count burns one found at the housekeeper Marta along with Boguet's book.

"Our coat of arms is a beacon to the community and we must be light to them...there is no brighter path than that of reason," the count argues.

Between the Gypsy's populism and the apparent "enlightenment" of the count, who is considered a man of science, power feeds on fear and uses it to its advantage.

After all, as the contessino argues, "fear moves all things" ... " and without it history would be devoid of interest."

And Scaiaccia turning to Silvia who does not believe him while the community is all on his side says, pointing to her blind eye, "It was not a fierce beast that did this to me, you have forgotten the law of the heart and the flesh, you think you are in control with your blind and desperate faith hidden under your good words, books and in the most absurd things, but from fear there is no escape..."

Here the film also underscores, through the gypsy's words, the ambivalence of man's relationship with the sacred: on the one hand, he fears it as one might fear what one considers superior and is unable to master, and on the other hand, he is attracted to it as one is attracted to the origin from which one day one is emancipated. "The sacred," as Galimberti teaches, is an enduring dimension in the human condition; it can be removed, invoked, feared, even forgotten, but it operates nonetheless. To defend us from the sacred, religions were born, which, are not dimensions that relate us to the sacred but rather do a containment operation.

"Darkness is frightening, welcome it or shun it, that is your choice," argues James, while the priest, warns of the gypsy.

Everyone has his own power to play with, fear is the fertilizer of populism for which the best commandment is : BE FEARFUL AND SHUT UP!

"have you ever been afraid?

Do you remember when you were a child, did you ever wonder why you liked that game so much?

There were always those who would chase and those who would run and hide, and we would hold our breath and foretaste the moments before the inevitable

And the thing we were most afraid of was the thing we most yearned for..."

Fear moves all things, we all shy away from it, and yet there is no story that is not steeped in it

Principato thus arranges us before her incisive concept of fear as a major source of superstition, cruelty and subjugation: as a shaping force second only to nature itself, with its ability to govern humankind.

Elias Canetti argued that "of all things in the world, nothing evolves and transforms less than fear," because what man wants above all else is the security for which we are capable of trading even our happiness.

A sophisticated, erudite feature film stands on the promontory of fear to ridicule it and make it a concept on which it is obligatory to reflect in order to identify its danger, its demagogic instrumentalization, its use by power to the detriment of our rationality but above all of the sacredness of everything.

There are few monsters that justify our fear of them, yet our fear of the worst is stronger than their desire for the best.

26-Jul-2023 by Beatrice