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- TEXT BY MASSIMO FAGIOLI
- FROM THE BROCHURE OF THE FILM
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- A woman dressed in yellow, empty places, an image of a woman who seems
to be a phantasm, an immediately recognizable vagabond wandering barefoot
through the streets... but then there is a professional couple represented
explicitly as concrete reality.
- Behind, before and maybe after, these manifest social identities revolve
worlds of affects, of relationships, of vague, uncertain, nocturnal stories
which represent affects, identities, passions and quests that slip from
one scene to another, leaving every situation incomplete and suspended.
- If we wish to violently define, if not actually codify, the representations,
we can note, beyond the evident manifestation, two overwhelming propositions
which can be recounted in this way: a real image of a barefoot vagabond,
a woman, who any of us could meet along the way, and a phantasm who moves
through the dark streets, dressed, that is proposed, in such a way that
no one could think they had met her.
- A well-known image, thus, part of everyone's memory which the film
portrays as having been abandoned in order to realize a clear social identity
as Architect.
- But once she has achieved this mature social identity, oddly enough,
a phantasm reappears, the phantasm of a voice, a shadow, an image of a
male vagabond weary and in need of help.
- Re-emergence, thus, of fantasies and affects which seemed buried in
the past or in oneiric memories, erased each morning upon awaking.
- And they are not madnesses, in this uncertainty, vagueness, this flimsy
or non-existent relationship with the necessities of life, there is no
madness, because it clearly emerges that it is a quest to salvage something,
to find something without which well-being, being well, could turn fatal.
- Normal, socialized people always lay the table, vagabonds, male and
female, never eat, they drift, they amble without a destination, without
an aim until, perhaps, they fall sick because they have never provided,
as ants do, for the security of material reality.
- It seems that the protagonist has neither the intention nor the guilt
of rebelling against attained and established reality and, even when she
makes those brief allusions to the terrible menace of death, which is nothingness,
"All my life I've been buying milk and biscuits", she speaks
without hope, more than that, with an immediate return to the normal routine
of living together which buffers the mind from sudden ardours.
- But, at all once, everything returns, and reappears as a strange phantasm
in black trousers dragging a strange sheet or blanket, whose image disappears
without reason, only to dissolve into a procession of other images that
appear from who-knows-where and enter her house.
- But in this invasion of shadows, possibly phantasms, there is the discovery
of a reiterated "I love you" which leads up to an intensely prolonged
kiss that precipitates the story towards a "finale", recounted
in fragments by a man who succeeds in realizing a relationship with a woman,
a relationship as necessary as it is tormented and impossible.
- He says that, for a man, there can be no other way but to approach
a woman like this; that a woman who is different and in love can never
allow a man to be himself.
- As he speaks of the abandonment, far beyond we see the silhouetted
outline of the woman as she walks towards the infinite beyond, while he
too, that shadow who had seduced her, rolls about weeping in despair, his
cries dissolving into that same indefinite point into which her own image
vanishes.
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