Review by Beatrice On 27-Jun-2023
"I killed myself on July 26, 2012. I had recently turned 32 and not even four months before gave birth to my first and only daughter, Greta."
Fuani, a crasi of her father's name Furio and mother's name Anita, says she was born after nine years of her parents' marriage. After an abortion exactly: the father did not want children, he was devoted to his reading and movies, in the studio smoked by cigarettes.
He called her "the baby."
At home, Fuani narrates, no pleasure reigned, parents hated each other, and in preadolescence she felt sadness and loss of meaning.
Classical dance, classical high school with bad results, and then the university choice: Psychology in Rome.
The narrative, in the first person, in Eva Padoan's voice is interspersed with footage of common life, images, actions, films, metaphorical objects, photographs absolutely artistic and aesthetic.
Friendships, love, press officer for exhibitions, including that of artist Dawn Mellor, then journalist.
Marriage to Richard, notary public, and amidst anxiolytics and psychotropic drugs, she becomes pregnant...
Due to severe depression, Fuani at age 32, four months after the birth of her much-desired daughter Greta, jumps from the fourth floor of her aunt's house and despite her condition, survives the fall.
When people commit suicide, their thinking is paralyzed, options seem meager or nonexistent, their state of mind is hopeless, and despair permeates their entire mental faculty
Francesco Patierno's film, investigates mental distress: Fuani Marino is diagnosed as depressed, suffering from bipolar disorder.
Cyclothymia: psychological condition characterized by phases or cycles in which mood is alternately depressed (depression) or manic ( mania). The alternation may be interspersed with a period of varying duration in which the mood is normal
The narrative voice, sophisticated images, and descriptive footage do not yield to any rhetoric: no concessions to drama or compassion.
The director claims "to have espoused the style and a narrative mechanism, honed over time, composed of a creative mix of filmed images and stock footage artfully edited and manipulated to succeed in telling things that would be difficult to stage with a more conventional style or fictional narrative."
The contribution of the Luce Archives in terms of creative and communicative research was crucial to the success of the project's highly effective visionary capacity.
A research, an investigation into the psyche, emotionality, and social mechanisms that can set a precedent for narrating puzzles of biographies with a unanimous and transversal language.
Loosely based on the book Wake Me Up at Midnight by Fuani Marino, it stems from the need to process fractures, scars first in writing and then in images.
Francesco Patierno succeeds in transforming a story into an artistic operation where words mix with chemistry, poetry with images, psychiatry with reflection, illness with meaning and the extreme need to give an explanation to that potentially uncontrollable involuntary absence.
The thought that I might commit suicide forms coldly in my mind like a tree or a flower
27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice