Review by Beatrice On 25-Nov-2023
It was so easy to recognize oneself that now, amnesia would not be enough to stop.
Lydia returns home and her partner confesses to her that he has been sleeping with another woman.
She asks him to leave home but she is unable to return.
She works as a midwife, spends nights out and falls asleep on buses.
One night she is awakened by a driver who invites her to get off because he has to park the vehicle: she asks him where she can find a cab stand and he accompanies her, declaring that he finds it irresponsible to leave her alone.
At that point she shows up and they spend the evening and night together.
The next few days she seeks him out and makes up an excuse to go home to him, but Milos declares to her that he does not want to continue the acquaintance even as a friend.
As a modern-day Artemis, her profession allows her to institute an extremely professional and simultaneously empathetic participation with birthing women: she is very good at her job and manages to bring even extremely difficult deliveries to fruition.
Continuous images of labor pains, pains, difficulties, efforts, exhausting minutes of labor bordering on inhuman suffering accompany her life.
Salome her high school friend became pregnant and she supports her until the birth, taking care of all the moments involved in educating her to relax and train her body for the crucial moment.
Esmè is born, after a long and difficult torment of Salome so much so that the newly emerged baby girl does not emit any moan or move but Lydia's massages will lead her to her first moan.
She also accompanies Salome along the difficult, exhausting, depressive and conflicting postpartum. He also tries to relieve her of the strain of caring for Esmé by taking her with him every Wednesday.
A chance encounter in the hospital with Milos incomprehensibly induces her to invent a lie, in which she will be trapped and from which she will not be able to extricate herself except in the face of an irreversible event.
Lydia is an amiably helpful woman, a sincere friend, an irreproachable professional; in a moment of great fragility through which she embarks on a distorted, parallel path, in which she encloses herself in a lie with which she will have to come to terms, she allows a glimpse of the many sides of a supportive and responsible feminine yet fragile and confused.
The question of motherhood, of friendship, of the impact with her own unconscious assumed and yet improbable identity.
Role confusion, emotional instability, emotional loneliness, existential entanglement, loss of identity reference.
A woman in conflict with an unknown past, with an experience as a midwife, a potential mother, an unresolved companion, an
unreflective existence, at the mercy of a fragmented emotionality broken by an improper, inadequate, anonymous recognition.
In the distractions of time. In the appearances of the world. If rare is to find oneself, almost impossible is to recognize oneself. And to hold oneself for an instant.
25-Nov-2023 by Beatrice