Review by Fabian On 19-Nov-2023
Sicily, it is not known exactly where or when.
A village of shacks by the sea, among sheep, garbage, and violence.
A boy named Arturo, born before his mother was killed by the one-eyed man, called the Pig, wanders among many children, animals, and men.
He lives in a house flooded daily by rising seawater: here live two, then three women, prostitutes like all the others in the village who work at night, taken to work by a pickup truck belonging to the Pig.
Arturo is hyperkinetic, has a significant mental disability, suffers from epileptic seizures, is terrified of the one-eyed man, and has a special relationship with the sheep Camilla.
Loved, cared for, and protected by the women he lives with, friends of his mother Lucia. The point of connection between the three is the care and sense of protection they have for the boy, who freezes in the face of the violence he endured in his mother’s womb, who dances spinning around, who loves spaghetti and balls of yarn with which he creates wonderful labyrinthine installations among the ruins by the sea, knotting the threads to nails.
Arturo is The Son of Saul, he is a sort of unhappy Lazarus, disjointed, innocent, and somnambulant but Nuccia washes and feeds him while Betta is making him a knitted blanket to ensure a life elsewhere while the one-eyed man, or rather the Pig, wants to kill him…
A tragic and cruel reality without redemption, let alone cathartic: the captivity in which these women survive seems an irreversible condition between resignation, exhaustion, and projection.
The first scene is a femicide by kicks and punches, with the word “whore” always ready to justify the body ending up in the sea, while a child screams among the rocks of the mountain: that mountain that sometimes screams making the rocks fall.
The only man to rely on is a shepherd dressed as a goat, all the others are consumers/pigs.
The coexistence is in one room and behind a curtain, the patrons meet, in the kitchen there is the bidet, while the bathroom is outside and needs to be specified to customers who would otherwise urinate there.
Copper and second-hand clothes are recovered; the children grow up among mud, ruins, sea, and abandoned churches, while the women's disfigured bodies know no modesty and the latest arrival with a crown and a blue dress is sold to customers who pay hundreds of euros to the Pig.
Emma Dante's cinema is woman, and the woman has an inviolable sacredness, despite the violence of the male.
Here she is a mad Maenad; martyr, sacrificed at the altar of the phallic temple where killing, raping, screaming, sacrificing, remembering, and loving happen.
The sea rises and the mountain falls: nature makes itself felt and frightens although men are impassive, waiting their turn to penetrate the same woman, actually wanting to penetrate each other…
The feature film based on the eponymous play that debuted at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in 2020, is a contemporary tragedy about the cultural isolation of women and the slavery of their bodies, about the despair and care that accompanies them.
Mercy is a feeling generated by compassion for the misery of others.
Here it only concerns women, men are immune to it.
Dante's artistic gaze gives the spaces an overwhelming aesthetic, made of untamed nature, inhuman cruelty, desperate hope, resigned fatality: one enters a cinema that is a desecrated church where there is no law or desire.
Misericordia tells a squalid reality, full of poverty, illiteracy, and provincialism, exploring the hell of terrible decay, increasingly ignored by society,” says Emma Dante, “it tells of the fragility of women, the violence that continues to be perpetuated against them, their desperate and boundless loneliness.”
Here everything is obscene, dirty, and cruel; only nature, which is no less frightening than humanity, is majestic and wonderful.
The disquiet it portrays is shocking and deafening, suspended between survival and death, on a dark and blinding stage as only those who live by theater can represent.
The tragic metaphor of a humanity in collapse, between fragments of life and ruins of dignity.
For all the violence committed against her, for all the humiliations she has suffered, for her body that you have exploited, for her intelligence that you have trampled, for the ignorance in which you have left her, for the freedom you have denied her, for the mouth you have silenced, for the wings you have clipped, for all this: stand up, Gentlemen, before a Woman.
19-Nov-2023 by Fabian