Review by Beatrice On 02-Sep-2024
With her legs folded and clasped to her chest, and her head on her knees, the strong and confident woman embraces her fragile inner child.
Winter 1944.
Meticulously realistic reconstruction of village life over four seasons.
In a high mountain village in Trentino, where war is a distant but omnipresent horizon, live sisters Lucia, Ada, and Flavia, surrounded
by a plethora of children, by a sober and unspoiled nature, by many women and few men.
All through the figure of the father, the local teacher of children and adults, and of the three sisters—one infatuated with the soldier, the other with the possible autonomy granted to a female creature, the third accompanied by the talent to study. The mother, who defends her son Nino, continually harassed by her husband, is a child-making machine, as many as come. Two soldiers arrive on the scene, unleashing sexual appetites: while Lucia indulges, Ada resorts to the autoerotic space between the closet and the wall, inflicting self-punishments such as ingesting chicken poop to redeem herself from guilt.
All accompanied by school, poems, the music of Chopin and Vivaldi.
Catholicism and sin distributed everywhere while the men are at the front and the women try to survive among a lively and curious offspring.
Lucia, who becomes pregnant, marries the Sicilian soldier who, after leaving to meet his mother, never returns.
Lucia's journey through passion, love, depression, and childbirth with a daughter, Antonia, whom she will have to learn to love in spite of everything.
Delpero succeeds in exploring all facets of the feminine.
She starts from the body and its drives to arrive at the body as development, enmeshment, container, trap, cultural cage.
She starts from the psyche to enumerate the compressions, removals, and remote potential emancipations.
Polygamy and murder, journey and destiny, make these women and their path, written by religion, culture, and body, an opportunity for renunciation, redemption, and perhaps even emancipation.
A tragically poetic film, a spell of the gaze, a highly sought after, rare, precious work of art.
The skill of one who succeeds in painting a restless and multifaceted fresco of a reality, the female reality, yet to be discovered and investigated as if for the first time: the unsolvable and unutterable mystery of an unknown and indecipherable world.
Women must always remember who they are, and what they are capable of. They must not be afraid to traverse the endless fields of irrationality or even to remain suspended over the stars, at night, leaning on the balcony of the sky. They need not be afraid of the darkness that indwells things, for that darkness releases a multitude of treasures. That darkness they, free, disheveled, and proud, know as no man will ever know.
02-Sep-2024 by Beatrice
Maura Delpero movies
MATERNAL
2019