The RV 608 Nisi Dominus by Vivaldi accompanies the slow-motion beginning of the quarrel between two women, a daughter who slaps her mother, causing her head to hit the piano keyboard.

Because of this, Margaret is subjected to restrictive measures: for three months, she must stay 100 meters away from her mother, even though she herself is also severely injured with a visible cut on her eyebrow.

She has to leave the house where she lives with her family, which is actually the garage, in "line" with the family's restrictive measure.

Known in the village, anonymous and provincial, as a violent girl, she unleashes the curiosity and malevolence of the children as well as the younger sister Marion's companions, who were present during the assault.

A plethora of small bipeds, "perverse and polymorphic," as Freud called them, wicked and annoying, from the cold and muddy valley on the edge of a damp and sterile canal of humanity, engage in miserable acts of bullying that are propaedeutic to the construction of adulthood.

The mother Christina, a former presumed great musician, talent mortified by motherhood and therefore converted to teaching, will lose her hearing, although not completely and perhaps not even partially.

She will use this incident to emphasize the line that divides her life between talent and the impossibility of harnessing it.

It is not understood what led her to give birth to three evidently unwanted daughters. She continually resorts to new romantic stories, including the last one lived in an adolescent and brazen manner with the young Hervé.

Marion, the youngest at home, who sings and loves like her older/"mother" sister, ends up speaking only to God to ask for help and comfort in such an extreme situation.

An enigmatic, insidious, and sometimes misleading noir is the narrative spirit with which Meier constructs the labyrinthine, implicit, and sometimes grotesque lines of the family fabric.

The line of endurance;

the line that delimits being a biological parent without being a mother, as in the previous film Sister;

the boundary line of a sense of responsibility, guilt, victimization, assertion, limitation, modesty, dignity, submission, violence, insubordination, subordination...;

a line far from invisible that this film traverses with absolute clarity;

a line as a metaphor for the indelible inner traces that can mark the experiences of three daughters so different from a mother so identical to her disturbed narcissistic reflection.

The same lines and the same music that accompany the town/village Dogville by Lars von Trier, which tells the human misery, family horror, and violent attempt at redemption.

Despite everything, in both films, the sense of guilt and subordination produced by family relationships manage to trigger reactions that are nevertheless self-destructive and humiliating.

The insubordination of Mary, like that of Margaret, produces a long external and internal conflict, disturbing and damaging, even destructive to the point where the cathartic event of those who manage to remain silent and watch emerges to identify the way out of the insidious labyrinth of discomfort, malaise, and damage generated by the family and the community.

The muted violence of an absent, cruel, and pitiless love produces the soundtrack of the impossible search for dialectical and emotional compensation.

04-May-2023 by Beatrice