Review by Beatrice On 20-Aug-2023
The Hogar is a place where mothers who find themselves in situations of marginalization and abandonment can count on the protection that normally characterizes a home.
Teenage mothers-often girls-are taken into the Hogar at the most delicate time, that is, immediately before and after childbirth, and are supported from a material point of view.
These adolescents experience a condition of profound fragility: unfortunately, in the reality of the shantytown, villas misery, cases of family abandonment by men are very frequent-product of a widespread mentality of fierce machismo-and the girls find themselves pregnant without being able to count on anyone. The absolute lack of affection to which they have always been accustomed leads them to a very low self-esteem, as persons and as mothers, and makes their relationship with their child very conflicted.
According to recent statistics, even today in the Posadas area-historically one of the poorest regions in the country-about 21 percent of newborns have a mother between the ages of 10 and 19, and unfortunately the phenomenon is growing. There are currently 1,625 mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 in the area who already have two children. In addition, in recent years, situations are increasingly complicated: there are no shelter alternatives in the area, as in the case of underage victims of "trafficking," that is, kidnapping for prostitution and victims of domestic violence seeking refuge.
(https://www.jardin.it/dall-argentina/il-significato-di-hogar/)
Here we are in an Italian-Argentine religious center, a hogar run by nuns for single mothers. Sister Paola has just arrived in Buenos Aires from Italy and is to take perpetual vows. Lu and Fati are two 17-year-olds, completely different, but both with the same destiny: to be single mothers.
The contrast between the nuns and the girls is immediately apparent: the former with a vow of chastity and a predetermined life under the rules, the latter, each with different backgrounds, some victims of the environment and male violence, others even of clueless conflict with their own bodies and sexuality.
This is how the director recounts her experience:
For a long time I worked in Buenos Aires in an Italian religious institute for teenage mothers. I did not stop at the threshold to spy from the corridors, I entered their rooms, I listened and observed them, I shared their anxieties, we got to know each other. It was possible for me, and perhaps necessary, because in MATERNAL there is so much of me, my present and my past: the incense smell of the Catholic child, the friendships and loves of the passion-hungry teenager, the woman's sense of motherhood. I became for them a familiar figure, empathetic and at the same time invisible. From this internal, personal and emotional position I began to write a film about their unique story of young women. As I got closer to the world of the religious women who follow them, I felt that I was going through a complex and unique experience: teenage motherhood was not the only paradox I was dealing with. A pregnant 16-year-old girl impresses the eye. A nursing baby face brings with it a poignant contradiction. Nonetheless, it was the epiphanic image of a young nun cradling one of their children that set the film in motion: in that moment I realized the full power of the emotional short-circuit of a closed, paradoxical, and fascinating feminine world in which the precocious motherhood of girls coexists with the absent motherhood of nuns. The writing followed the desire to evoke the complexity and contradictions of this singular universe.
More than the mothers, here it is the children who describe them:
Nina is Lu's daughter, a girl/mother impatient with her condition, looking to escape with her boyfriend who beats her but tells her "you drive me crazy" and she "falls for it" every time, remaining eternally waiting for his messages; Nina is always looking for the love of a mother who is elsewhere and will find it in Sister Paola who will discover her need to love.
Fati also has a child and is expecting another, but she is unable to love the first, always waiting for a gesture of affection, hungry for love and attention; but Fati hides a secret that Lu will shout at her mercilessly.
The picture of that mother who is stuck on the head of the bed, the mother of the abusive stepfather from whom she also awaits her second child.
Shattering realities these, of early trauma, of involuntary and unconscious motherhood, immature and violent.
And the nuns who grant and regulate: they grant dance parties where they dance like "whores," say the girls themselves, while the nuns from outside regulate watch over and supervise from above and below their condition.
Only since Dec. 30, 2020, has Argentina legalized abortion, and the film/documentary was shot shortly before.
But caring for one's children, where one is able, is not the same as loving; the maternal sense, which is not instinct, can arise even if one is not a biological mother, see Sister Paula, and be unreciprocated even if one is.
Meanwhile, the sisters carry out their mission: to teach what is the "holy family" consisting of Mary Joseph and the baby Jesus that the children must kiss and then proceed to draw their own family-a lesson that to call cruel, seems like an exercise in linguistic style.
Even the parable of the lost sheep seems not to work when Lu returns after running away for days with her fiancé-Nina will risk being placed in foster care, and meanwhile mother and daughter will be removed from the hogar.
The surprising film reveals Delpero's documentary talent: a portrait built from the experience of years living in these realities. Dialogues, faces, situations, and narratives are extremely credible, a throwback neorealism that of the director absolutely built on facts.
The nail polish, the makeup, the clothes remedied, donated, the bruises, the traumas, the violence, the impossibility of love, the discovery of love: objects, feelings, difficulties of lives marked forever.
This and much more is what this document is about: Nina listens to what is about to happen to her and escapes into the arms of Sister Paula now without a veil, torn from her by the Magdalene of the situation who gives her back a new s-dress, returning her to a potential motherhood suffocated by the extreme choice.
Who a mother is, what a mother is and what it means to be one.
Can one become one by biological accident alone?
Does there have to be a choice?
Why does the responsibility always fall on mothers in a planet of men who are absent except in the form/presence of sperm?
No male figure appears in this film except for a guy who comes running down the street to get on a bus and leave. The metaphor of an absence; the chronicle of a contumacy announced the male one by the accidentality of a sexual encounter that leaves its mark and sometimes, too often the wound in a female body fecund in spite of itself.
Accidental and unconscious mothers, mothers abused and violated even by their respective mothers; not equally mysterious and tragic mothers on bodies that embody their own torment or tormented inviolability.
Two worlds compared those of the body of virginity for which " with Christ I lack nothing" to those of the body of motherhood for which with a child I lack everything.
Delpero's stylistic quality can be seen in the details: the nonprofessional actresses and their power, the toys everywhere, the posters, the noisy fans, the half-open rooms, the notebooks, the colors, the clutter, the clotheslines, the stolen scotch for shaving, the deodorant in the panties, the nail polish always present as the only colors allowed, are the attention placed on a world observed with extreme lucidity.
In many but especially in these conditions narrated by the film, pregnancy stirs anger, fear, frustration.
Love is not free from hate although the rhetoric about motherhood tends to stifle it;
in the woman, in fact, much more markedly than in the male, two antithetical subjectivities struggle because one lives at the expense of the other. A subjectivity that says "I" and a subjectivity that makes the woman feel like the "depository of the species." The conflict between these two subjectivities underlies maternal love, but also maternal hatred, because every son, lives and feeds on the mother's sacrifice: sacrifice of her time, her body, her space, her sleep, her relationships, her work, her career, her affections and even loves, other than love for her son. If then the child is the child of lawlessness, betrayal, poverty, fear, and cluelessness, then not only the conflict between the two subjectivities, but also the impossibility of foreshadowing a future for the child digs into the mother's unconscious what she does not want to see and to ascertain every day: that her child is too distant too dissimilar from her own dream or desire. It is at this point that the love-hate ambivalence, which the world of mothers knows better than the world of fathers, becomes empowered and calls for a solution that cannot be found except in the recognition and acceptance of this ambivalence as a natural thing, and not with the guilt that can arise from interpreting it as incompleteness or inauthenticity of one's own feeling. The suggested remedy is then to "care for mothers," because, because of the form our society has taken, perhaps, for many women, too much is the metamorphosis of their bodies, the robbery of their time, the occupation of their physical and outer, inner and deep space. And when the soul is empty and no caress reassures the feeling, consolidates it and fortifies it, the terrible is at the doorstep, not so much as an unconscious act, but as the emptying of those resources that make a dam for love by separating it from hatred, for the serene gaze that keeps away the truce feeling. Nature defiles these extremes. And the mother, who begets and grows in isolation and loneliness, knows how fragile the limit is. She no longer knows what is going on inside her, and her actions take place without her. Therefore, nature wants two to beget, not only at the moment of conception and birth, but especially at the moment of care and nurturing. Where to be cared for, before the child who follows its biological cadence, is the mother, who has made available first her body, then her time, then her outer and inner space, and finally the ambivalence of her emotions that always walk brushing against that thin boundary that separates and at the same time unites life and death, because that is how nature wants it in its motherly and cruel aspect, which mothers feel when they sink into that black and so unreassuring light that makes its appearance in the abyss of loneliness.
"Maternal" in ninety-one minutes manages to settle and invade the abyss of our interiority in the face of this theme: as an excellent and honest documentary film it cannot consider the hypothesis of an ending much less a miserable happy end. It presents, narrates, portrays, documents and rigorously epochs any judgment and solution. THANK YOU!
20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice
Maura Delpero movies
VERMIGLIO
2024