Un television quiz, a man and a woman competing for a good sum, both engineers. “What a coincidence!” the host gloats. Yes, it’s a shame that during the challenge, he is mostly called “the engineer” and she is “the girl” (being almost 40 years old) or “the lady”both having declared their skills.
Small things, you might say. The host is elderly and perhaps hasn’t yet understood how gender equality works. And that is, for example, that the messages that pass most easily are not those contained in lectures, but those that we let fall around, between the lines, perhaps in a quiz with a stellar share.
Or in a television series, like the one I devoured on Sky, with an already quite evocative title: All her faultIn short, it’s all her faultbased on the novel by Andrea Mara. It is the story of the kidnapping of a child of a seemingly perfect couple: he, Peter, and she, Marissa, each with a well-paid job, a magazine house, and a son, Milo, who disappears from kindergarten.
Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
The screenplay will reveal the secrets of this community which also includes Peter’s brother and sister. The first, who ended up in a wheelchair due to an accident caused by his sister: all his fault, in fact (spoiler: it will be discovered that the responsibility lies with Peter, who hid it). But even the kidnapping of the child is immediately blamed by the Mephistophelian Peter on his wife, who follows her son more closely.
Another mother, Jenny, who sympathizes with Marissa, is forced by her husband (and by her own feelings of guilt) to sacrifice her job to look after her son, Milo’s kindergarten classmate. At a certain point the story falls to a point of no return that Marissa will only confess to Jenny. “This series is about female friendship,” said the author.
Maybe to not push too much, in an America that is removing woke culture, on the central issue: the blaming of women. The key scene is the one in which the inspector reveals to Marissa that he has understood what crime she committed but declares the case closed. After all, it wasn’t his fault…
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Antonella Baccaro’s articles on I Woman and on Corriere della Sera.
