TOIt’s coming tonight on first TV on on Rai 5 at 9.15pm, Maternal, movie of 2019 of Italian-Argentine production directed by Maura Delpero, director and screenwriter born in Bolzano in 1975. Presented at the Locarno Film Festival and then in other 130 festivals, the story collected several awards, including a nomination at the Nastri d’Argento and one at the David di Donatello for Delpero making his debut in a feature film. Previously, Maura has worked on documentaries – short and medium length – since 2005.
Maternalthe plot
The protagonists are two 17 year olds, Lu and Fati – diminutives of Luciana and Fatima, played by Agustina Malale and Denise Carrizo. If Lu is definitely more unstable and full of anger; she shamelessly expresses all her annoyance for her daughter Nina, who she rejects and seeks out for her; Fati, on the other hand, is more maternal; she is pregnant but she already has a son (Michael).
The girls are guests of a Hogar, an Italian-Argentine religious center for single mothers from low social backgrounds. A paradoxical place – and situation: where women who have decided to give their chaste and righteous lives to God find themselves caring for teenage mothers. They and their little ones, looking for a seemingly impossible balance. Save for the natural Christian sense of welcome.
Things change with the entry of Sister Paola, arrived from Italy to finish the novitiate and take her final vows. In fact, the young nun bonds with little Nina with a particular, excessive dedication. In an ambiguous state between the desire for motherhood and vocation, Paola becomes a sort of surrogate mother, creating quite a bit of friction with Lu. Put in the bizarre position of claiming if not affection at least the object produced by her.
Agustina Malale (Lu) and Denise Carrizo (Fati). (Lucky Red)
Motherhood and religion compared
The strength of Maternal – within the great mixture of the mystique of the family, exasperated by the current Meloni government – is that of non-positioning. Of caring for children beyond the blood relationship. A principle that arrived shortly before queer family by Michela Murgiamoreover a conglomeration of affections resold with new packaging but which has always existed.
What does it add? Maura Delporto to this ideashe who for four years were you a cinema teacher in a reception center in Buenos Aires? It adds an engaging vision of the levels of perception of motherhood, approached in the rituals of cleaning and care and in the abstract ones of a holy hand that welcomes and, from a higher moral height, welcomes the fruit of superficiality. Irresponsible behavior.
But Sister Paola – young, beautiful, shamelessly divine – and Lu, the two terms of the clash of Maternalthey are not two opposite and irreconcilable entities. They are rather two forces of the same desire – positive and negative, dark and bright – for motherhood. And how giving life can be a brutal gymnastic exercise, purely mechanical and devitalized. When for another person, ready to give up the body, the same impossible experience becomes a sublimation. The idea of a miracle, no less transgressive than a young mother.
Nina and Sister Paola (Lidiya Liberman). (Lucky Red)
Delpero is very good, then, to overcome the traps of the plot, of the plot needs. With the keen gaze of a documentarian, he slides on tensions for most of the film. Sometimes it sinks, as in the party scene and the sensual dancing girls, poised between sin and mystical elevation. A confusion of messages which, in reality, pushes the real nuns to separate the girls: the case that occurred in Naples with two models kissing on the street. But Maura’s register is sensorial, anti-rhetorical; and Sister Paola knows what she sees beyond a broken religious precept, and it is precisely her concrete miraculous nature that puts her in crisis.
The cast of Maternal
There is very little information on the cast of the film – excluding the actress who plays Paola.
Lidiya Liberman (Paola) is a Ukrainian actress born in 1986 who studied at the Alexander Dovgenko School in Kiev and film directing at the Kiev National University. After graduating from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, she got a part in the film Blood of my blood Of Marco Bellocchioreleased in 2015. In 2019 – as well as Maternal – is part of the cast of The bad poet by Gianluca Jodice, while in 2022 he stars in I am the abyss by Donato Carrisi.
It was also part of the series God help us and the film The stone eater with Luigi Lo Cascio.
iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED