The new film by Mario Martone, Fuori, in theaters this Wednesday, December 3, resurrects the figure of Goliarda Sapienza, the Italian author of the famous The Art of Joy, exploring her relationship with a certain Roberta, encountered in prison.
Despite a good thirty-something films to his credit, the Italian director Mario Martone still finds a way to surprise with Fuori. With this intimate chronicle echoing feminist resonance, he resurrects the actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza, known for The Art of Joy, an immense literary success published posthumously in 1998.
However, it is not so much this novel that Fuori focuses on, but rather on The Rebibbia University and The Certainties of Doubt, two other books less known and more autobiographical in which the writer, who died in 1996, puts on paper a key period of her singular trajectory. The film begins with her incarceration for five days after she stole jewelry from an acquaintance… We are in 1980, and Goliarda Sapienza is then ruined. Never voyeuristic, the camera of Mario Martone shows scenes of life inside the women’s penitentiary where she is imprisoned.
A Free Woman
The film lingers mainly on the post-prison – fuori means “outside” in Italian – as Goliarda reconnects with Roberta, a young heroin-addicted inmate, a free spirit with a troubled past. Between the two women a layered relationship emerges: there is respect, fascination, sometimes a very strong friendship, at other times a potential romance… Where the younger woman seems haunted by the birth of a lesbian desire she struggles to tame, Goliarda, for her part, appears open, ready to experiment.
It is through her that Fuori takes on its full meaning. Interpreted with maestria by Valeria Golino (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), the character quickly becomes a source of inspiration in her way of enjoying a freedom that her era did not encourage. Having moved from actress to writer, associated with the socialist-anarchist movement of her country, at one time cut off from the world to devote herself to her art, Goliarda Sapienza appears as an elusive figure, undeniably queer, who allows herself to be carried by her desires and instincts.
cinema | film | culture | Cannes Film Festival
