Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Leila and her Brothersfilm by Iranian director Saeed Roustayisays a young woman and her four brothers.
In the background, but not so much, there is the couple of parents. A father who immediately inspires a mixture of pity and suspicion for the intersection of weakness and petulance that never melts, for the hunger for recognition in the family of origin that haunts him to the point of undermining any concern for his own heirs.
And a motherof which you will not find a trace in the reviews, which moves solicitously in a cone of marital shadow, hostile to the impatience and disruptive strength of Leila.
Myfilm by Ivano De Matteoinstead follows the story of a fifteen-year-old Italian girl and her her family tranquility which shatters under the impact of a first boyfrienda textbook bully boy, possessive and manipulative.
Here too, the generation of the parents is the captain a father who tries to free “his” Mia from the trapimagining being able to give her back as a child to her previous life.
Again, the mother – to which an extraordinary Milena Mancini gives voice and gestures – remains in the background, says and does the right things, but fails to stop the mechanisms who open the door of the small Roman apartment on the cliff.
In a double plot that calls for an “easy” identification with the protagonists, Leila and Mia, I was struck by how much it was the two mother figures that caught my attention from the very first shots.
And, after spying on/measuring them line by line, I saw myself there, on the imaginary threshold of an emergency exit from the cinema in my head, booing them at the end of the screening with a passion disproportionate to their responsibilities with respect to the male characters. Why?
Perhaps because we have crossed literature and cinematography proudly slipping into the wake of heroines capable of overturning predictions. But, in fiction and more in reality, we are aware of how powerful – even overbearing – delay is, that conditioned reflex that led us to demeanor and composure, which convinced us not to expose ourselves and not to shout, to mediate behind the scenes as far as it seemed possible. And beyond.
Perhaps this script of subtle submission embraced by mothers has already been emptied by time, for generations that have passed by getting sideways. Perhaps seeing him again on stage has simply reactivated an imaginary that Freud would have defined un-heimlichuncanny, precisely because it overturns what is most familiar (Heim) and we believed buried, quieted.
Or maybe it’s just that, sometimes, we get infinitely tired. The fear of not doing enoughof not having dug – again and again a little – to free up space around the steps and destinies of Leila, Mia and the others after us.
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