3 days ago
3
The list of films presenting a prison sentence as a life-enhancing experience is a short one, which is enough on its own to grant Mario Martone‘s latest “Fuori” a certain novelty. Its subject, the late Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza, spent all of five days behind bars in her mid-fifties, for the crime of having stolen a friend’s jewelry. She emerged from the clink claiming to have found more acceptance and understanding among her fellow inmates than in the Italian intellectual circles she had spent decades trying to crack. Whether you’re familiar with Sapienza’s work or not — and outside Italy, the answer is likelier to be “not” — this sounds like fine material for a tightly focused, potentially poignant micro-biopic. But Martone’s repetitive, tediously non-linear film attempts something more impressionistic and expansive, with emotionally muted and sometimes strangely exploitative results.
After a lengthy run of Venice-premiered features, many of them rooted in Italian national history and lore, that could diplomatically be deemed of primarily local interest, Martone returned to the Cannes competition — and to many international arthouse markets — with 2022’s “Nostalgia,” a handsome, atmospheric Neapolitan crime drama enhanced by the star presence of Pierfrancesco Favino. The 65-year-old director’s first fiction feature since then has once more landed in Cannes’ premier section, though it feels like a return to less broadly appealing form. Though the casting of crossover veteran Valeria Golino as Sapienza gives global distributors something to hold onto, this insular and narratively muddy portrait offers outside viewers limited insight into a woman whom the closing titles baldly claim is “considered among the greatest writers of the 20th century.”
Thereby hangs a tale, since Sapienza’s name-making novel “The Art of Joy” only narrowly slipped into said century: It was published in 1998, two years after her death at the age of 72, and a full two decades after its completion. (An English translation only hit shelves in 2013.) Her reputation has largely grown posthumously, while “Fuori” finds Sapienza, at the outset of the 1980s, unheralded and unpublished beyond some minor volumes. Following some florid introductory titles that describe her as “inspiring love and furor equally,” she’s introduced being strip-searched upon her entry into Rome’s Rebibbia women’s prison, before cutting to some time after her short sentence, as the flat-broke writer struggles to find even menial employment.
The film will continue in this restless, darting manner, as Martone, co-writer Ippolita di Majo and editor Jacopo Quadri aim to cultivate some sense of intrigue around Sapienza’s journey by withholding key information about the past until fairly arbitrary points in the overall structure. It’s not until roughly halfway through proceedings, for example, that audiences learn exactly what act improbably landed this respectable middle-aged woman in jail. By this stage, however, we have established the firm bond she forms on the inside with Roberta (Matilda de Angelis), a younger, heroin-addicted tearaway and regular Rebibbia guest, and more vaguely with Roberta’s friend Barbara (Italian pop star Elodie), and it’s in this female alliance that the film’s interests predominantly lie.
The relationship between Sapienza and Roberta — partly a friendship, partly a mutual, bemused fascination — continues when both are eventually released, as they repeatedly rendezvous at various obscure Roman locations to drink too much, commit crimes of varying degrees and talk through their respectively wayward lives. There’s a passive-aggressive dynamic to their interactions that grows repetitive after a while, as the newly inspired older writer regards the younger rebel as an object of study, while the latter chafes against that very objectification — and round and round they go. At least we get Sapienza’s fixation: De Angelis is electric as the capricious, self-destructive Roberta, even if the character herself isn’t very substantively written, and the film’s very pulse quickens whenever she enters the frame.
It’s not immediately clear whether Sapienza’s interest in the young woman goes beyond the platonic — Golino’s reserved performance teases many possibilities behind a weathered, wistful gaze — or whether the film is letting its own sensual imagination roam. In this ostensibly feminist study, for example, it’s hard not to sense an intrusive male gaze behind a bizarrely gratuitous interlude where the three reunited cellmates spontaneously decide to take a shower together. Though the script is loosely drawn from multiple texts by Sapienza, her own authorial voice doesn’t emerge in what mostly amounts to a drifting, episodically disordered mood piece, lensed in a perma-golden late-afternoon haze by DP Paolo Carnera, that bookmarks ideas on class difference and generational shifts in feminine identity, but can’t stay in one place long enough to expand on them. “A story thief, that’s me,” says the creatively invigorated Sapienza of herself; “Fuori” in turn borrows her narrative hand-me-downs, and some meaning feels lost along the way.
English (US) ·