Of postfeminist girls and fireflies: Consuming Rome in Un giorno speciale

Introduction

Mais que diviennent aujourd’hui les signaux lumineux évoqués par Pasolini en 1941 puis tristement révoqués en 1975? Quelles en sont les chances d’apparition ou les zones d’effacement, les puissances ou les fragilités? À quelle part de la réalité – le contraire d’un tout – l’image des lucioles peut-elle s’adresser aujourd’hui? (Didi-Huberman, 2009: 36)

With these questions Georges Didi-Huberman attempted to recover the revolutionary potential of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s thought for the 21st century, using the symbol of the firefly. Toward the end of his life, in 1975, in ‘L’articolo delle lucciole’ Pasolini argued that the putative extinction of this ethereal creature was symbolic of the spread of urban, consumerist Italy. For Pasolini the firefly provided the means to articulate his disillusion with the humble people of Italy, the disenfranchised, the subproletariat, the peasants, and what he saw as the disappearance of their resistant spirit into the homogeneity of consumer culture in Italy’s boom of the 1960s. In his words: ‘Ho visto dunque “coi miei sensi” il comportamento coatto del potere dei consumi ricreare e deformare la coscienza del popolo italiano, fino a una irreversibile degradazione.’ ¹ Drawing inspiration from Pasolini’s own earlier optimism, Didi-Huberman has suggested nonetheless that there are still fireflies, just as there are still traces of this revolutionary potential around us even today, pulsing with the same fragile intermittent light, for example in the avant-garde film-making of Laura Waddington, dedicated to the Sangatte refugee camp (Didi-Huberman, 2009: 134). In a quite different context, in her recent work on girl culture and its ‘sparklefication,’ Mary Celeste Kearney points toward a more recent return to fireflies themselves, in the online media that US girls have made. Kearney moves from Rachel Moseley’s observations that sparkle has come to dominate girl culture as another ‘spectacular’ means of locating feminine power in appearance, to thinking about what creative media interventions some girls have made in the name of sparkle, citing in particular the

spectacular videos for Owl City’s “Fireflies” [made] by editing together sparkly scenes from numerous animated films and TV shows (e.g., kbSrep882009; Neriede 2010; Rivens 2009). The effect of these vids is breathtakingly beautiful, as their lengthy, non-narrative streams of richly luminous shots bathe viewers in shimmering light. (Kearney, 2015: 9)

I will show how Comencini uses Rome to respond to the sense of a ‘failed revolution,’ which I understand here to describe second-wave Italian feminists’ recent interpretation of the postfeminist recycling of female stereotypes often associated with Silvio Berlusconi’s television and under-age sex scandals. I will consider in particular, therefore, the inter-generational dialogue which frames Francesca Comencini’s recent film Un giorno speciale. Although made in 2012, I would argue that this film also belongs to the very recent wave of films attempting to re-examine the significance of Rome’s landscape for cinema in reviving discourses of the 1970s that are the focus of this journal issue. Made in the wake of the Berlusconi scandals that included the exchange of television jobs for sexual favors, the film mobilizes a familiar set of dichotomies to express nostalgia for the clarity of a second-wave feminist vision: margins and center, authenticity and artifice, rebellion and conformity, agency and coercion. However, in blending more popular cultural forms from Hollywood with familiar apocalyptical readings of the cityscape inherited from Fellini and Pasolini, the film also marks significant shifts in interpretations of the cityscape and its association with the body politic through the degraded female figure. As I will argue here, recognition of the ambiguities of postfeminist culture, expressed through the motif of ‘girl power,’ reframes spatial dichotomies of artifice and authenticity. At times, as I shall show, it also speaks to the project of Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, to explore the potential for ‘commodity-driven social resistance,’ ‘the lurking promise of political resistance within the bounds of commodified popular culture and mainstream media’ (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 4–5). Like Kearney, Comencini is interested in how ‘girls are negotiating the contradictory messages of postfeminist culture’ and making ‘critical reclamations of femininity’ (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 8). Complicating the sometimes Manichean divide between generations of feminists, the film puts questions of branding (of products and the self) at the center of the debate about Italy’s future. Comencini’s film is the story of two consumer citizens still reckoning with what Banet-Weiser describes as ‘the power of authenticity’ (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 5), and in this struggle, Rome emerges as a cityscape that is indeed postmodern, as Filippo Trentin has argued, in its tantalizing promise of a return to lost origins that turn out only to be another fairytale. Nonetheless, it is also a space in which the girl can embody intermittently the symbolic potential of the elusive ‘firefly,’ Didi-Huberman’s, and now Kearney’s, re-vitalized sign of the survival (rather than Pasolinian demise) of popular rebellion.

Background: Feminism and intergenerational dialogue

In 2011–2012 the high-profile feminist campaign ‘Se non ora quando,’ within Italy and beyond, mobilized the mass protest of a generation of women appalled by the representation of women in the Italian media and galvanized in particular by the scandals surrounding then Prime Minister Berlusconi and a series of much younger women. The film-making sisters Cristina and Francesca Comencini were figureheads for the movement, lending it a certain cultural cachet, and both of them produced work speaking directly to the crisis. Cristina Comencini wrote a play – Libere (2012) – based on the dialogue between a woman who has lived through the second-wave feminist activism of the 1970s and a younger woman (performed by Lunetta Savino and Isabella Ragonese respectively). The play was directed by Francesca Comencini. One might suggest therefore that it represented in some way the view of both sisters on the crisis.

Three minutes into the dialogue, the younger woman refers to a situation in which women have to sell themselves for a part on television. Francesca Comencini picked up on this theme when she also directed her own film Un giorno speciale, a day in the life of a girl who has to exchange sexual favors for placement in a television show, directly referencing the Rai Fiction scandal among others. ² The ‘Se non ora quando’ movement was criticized for its moralizing response to the crisis, in particular by Valeria Ottonelli, who noted its condemnation of the women involved in the Berlusconi scandals (Ottonelli, 2011: 14). The dialogue of the play Libere is dripping with such references, with its description of ‘bambole di plastica’ and its despairing focus on a nation in which women are reduced to their bodies and forced to sell themselves. The figure of the girl, here named as Noemi Letizia, and her looks is a particular focus for the older woman’s anxieties. ³ I have written elsewhere of the problems relating to the reading of women involved in the Berlusconi scandals that do not take into account and understand the dramatically changing conditions within which feminism operates, seeking instead to resurrect the models of a previous generation (Hipkins, 2011). Libere bears evidence of this in its nostalgic hearkening back to the female spaces of 1970s feminist consciousness-raising, while fully aware that they have not been sufficient to fully transform women’s position in the cultural landscape.

In this article I argue that Francesca Comencini’s film presents a more nuanced depiction of this political conundrum. Its fictional narrative introduces precisely those complexities of the postfeminist context, and creates a tension within the film between the discourses of moral degradation (fed not only by ‘Se non ora quando,’ but also precisely by the Rome-related cinematic imaginary that is the subject of this issue) and new ways of reading the young female subject under consumer capitalism. Here I argue that a reading of the film’s representation of Rome in this context offers the clearest way into reading this tension. In this way the film also offers ways into reading the Rome-related imaginary as captured between the discourses of apocalypse and subversion.

Cinderella comes undone: The discourse of moral degradation

Un giorno speciale follows a 19-year-old aspiring actress, Gina (Giulia Valentini), from a socially disadvantaged background in the Roman periphery, on the day her mother encourages her to ‘visit’ an influential male politician in the hope of getting her into television. Hence, once again, we see what I have labeled ‘the showgirl effect,’ an anxiety about supposedly misdirected young female ambition, driving the narrative (Hipkins, 2015). After a makeover, provided by her solicitous mother, Gina is collected by a young driver Marco (Filippo Scicchitano) on his first day in the job. The appointment in the center of Rome is repeatedly delayed, causing the young pair to become closer over the course of the day spent driving round Rome. It gradually becomes clear that Gina’s appointment with the politician will be her first experience of sex work. The film draws to a close with Gina fulfilling her engagement, and Marco taking her home, both of them visibly shaken and silent. At the end, after returning the car to the depot, Marco attempts to find her again, shouting her name into the piazza in front of her apartment block, but a tear-stained Gina merely stares blankly into the television screen. Does she hear his voice and ignore him, or is his voice cancelled out by the blare of the television show?

Images of television screens blaring in the suburbs bookend the film. The opening edits together a series of shots of windows in the apartment blocks of the Roman periphery through which flickering television screens are often visible, and the soundtrack is built of a cacophony of voices emitted by these television sets, culminating in the theme track of Italian news show, TG1, upon which the camera moves inside Gina’s home. Here too, the heroine’s mother is in front of the television, if only momentarily. From the opening scene of the film these are references to a discourse of degradation that takes us directly back to Pasolini; in particular they reference his denunciation of a society in which consumerism had extinguished the spirit of those elements previously outside the logic of labor and capital, such as the subproletariat (extinguished like the fireflies he once saw in the Italian countryside). Didi-Huberman (2009: 36) shows how for Pasolini this was closely linked to the ‘luce accecante dei riflettori’ that he associated with the homogenizing effect of television as early as 1958 with his essay on ‘Neocapitalismo televisuale.’ Andrea Minuz (2014) has observed that this strong emphasis on the corrupting influence of television in Italy has since become a reflex reaction and lazy shorthand for moral decay in Italian left-wing culture. Thus Comencini’s opening critique of the role of television in Italian society reaches back to Pasolini through a tired metonym that resonates through my initial analysis of the film and its use of an existing Rome-related imaginary. In the second part of this article, however, I will argue that her detailed treatment of the girl’s visit to the politician (a mere apocalyptic detail in the recent film Suburra (Sollima, 2015), for example, in which the anonymous girl emerges as a corpse), eventually restores nuance to a similarly worn motif.

Gina’s mother’s morning task is to prepare her 19-year-old daughter for an appointment, one for which Gina initially seems reluctant to get ready. Later in the film, it will transpire that the appointment is for Gina to exchange sexual services for a possible job in television. It is of course the aspiration to get Gina on television (she has already had a small part on a show) that most directly associates the family with Pasolini’s critique. However, it is the mother’s emphasis on Gina’s appearance – she worries over her eyebrows, she has bought her a dress and a pair of very high, sparkling heels – that initiates a theme of a preoccupation with gloss that haunts Gina through the film. Later, when hesitating over whether or not to join her new friend in ten-pin bowling for fear of ruining her nails, Gina echoes her mother’s first words in the film: ‘Mi si è rovinata la French.’ In some ways, this projection of blame for Gina’s ‘misplaced’ consumerist values onto the mother is in keeping with a broader tendency towards blaming older women’s preoccupation with a beauty culture, almost as if they have invented the cultural refusal of aging women themselves (see, for example, the scene in La grande bellezza (Sorrentino, 2013), in which the aging showgirl is ridiculed for attempting to stay beautiful). In Comencini’s film, however, this projection of blame onto the maternal body seems to stand in for a projection of blame onto a generation of women who have failed their daughters, which is highly problematic given the class context of this scenario. Gina and her mother, the film suggests, belong to a lower middle-class or working-class context. Furthermore the director’s choice of the peripheral location of Ponte di Nona is directly associated with the female body. An outlying suburb sitting to the east of Rome outside the main Roman ring road, the originally small agricultural community has grown enormously since 2002 with the construction of large new housing estates. In an interview Comencini describes Ponte di Nona, ‘piazzato nel nulla però con grande cura estetica,’ as possessing ‘una bellezza fatua’ that she compares to Gina’s makeover (Spera, 2012). The area’s evident attempts to enliven the modern architecture with a range of bright colors are intended to reflect the scenes in which Gina’s beauty is artificially enhanced by eyeshadow and nail varnish by her mother. This association of the city, or its periphery, with a tainted female body is directly connected to a long-standing and problematic tradition of the representation of Italy as fallen woman (Marcus, 2000). As Comencini emphasizes: ‘Mi sembra che ci possa essere un legame tra la bellezza di Roma e la bellezza della protagonista nel senso che entrambe vivono continuamente il rischio di un prolasso’ (Fontana, 2012). From the ambivalent symbol of the sparkling heels to this verbal condemnation of female self-adornment, it is evident that Comencini’s ‘fireflies’ are not to be found in any adaptation of feminine beauty practices, such as those identified by Kearney.

The preoccupation with appearance and gloss, however, is not entirely feminized. The young driver Marco who pulls up in the central square of the district in a shiny black Mercedes for his first day of work also likes the idea of ‘making it’ in a quick and intuitive manner, if not based upon his body then upon a Berlusconi-inspired business model of quick thinking and being in the right place at the right time. His attachment to the material is reflected in his flashy (fake?) watch, clocked by Gina’s initially silent gaze, and his constant concern over the shine of his car, worrying over the possibility that a bird might dirty it, and taking pride in its luxuries of a satnav and a mini-fridge. Marco too is associated with the suburbs – he tells Gina that he also lives in this area, although his statement that he lives just inside the ‘raccordo annulare’ provokes a negative reaction from her, as if he is parading his slightly less peripheral identity. If anything, it emerges, Marco’s background is more modest than Gina’s; while her mother is a beautician, his mother is a cleaner, who does seamstress work on the side to make ends meet. Both women, it would seem, are concerned with keeping up appearances in an Italy riven with corruption.

In this imagined seduction of the working class by the sparkle of nail polish, the gleam of the television set, and the big shiny black Mercedes, Comencini appears to set the film in a direct line of descent from Pasolini’s apocalyptic interpretation of the ‘corruption’ of the humbler classes by consumer culture. At the same time her film appears also to hanker for a more innocent vision of the people who inhabit the margins of Rome, associated with Pasolini’s earlier idealization of the subproletariat. Early on in the film, just after Marco has collected Gina, the pair run into a flock of sheep. These are the sheep that mingle with the suburbs as Rome blurs into the surrounding countryside, sheep that we also see in Sacro GRA (Rosi, 2013), underlining the absurd juxtapositions of Rome’s outskirts, and sheep that also appeared in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), which also has shots of the large cars transporting Hollywood star Silvia (Anita Ekberg) slowed down by sheep across the road, a symbol of the country’s uneven progress. A natural symbol, their recurrence across these films seems to hint at the persistence of pre-modern elements in postmodern Rome, and tallies with the thesis of a continued existence of fireflies. Here, however, these bucolic edges of Rome also offer a hint at something reminiscent of the earlier Pasolinian reading of the Roman ‘borgata,’ those films like Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), in which young (criminal) men on the margins of the city embodied a vitality that resisted (ever more weakly) the encroachment of modernization. In Gina there are traces of a connection with this tradition of Rome’s wild edges, as we see her lead Marco through a hole in a wall to visit a lone, tethered white horse she has befriended in a field. The movement of Gina in particular from periphery to center echoes a Pasolinian sense of a ‘fall’ as the innocent become entangled in central Roman aspirations. Similarly the casting of the unknown Giulia Valentini, herself an aspiring model and actress, to play Gina pays tribute to a tradition in Italian film and television of using unknown actors, particularly in relation to representations of working-class Rome. As Catherine O’Rawe has commented in relation to the casting of Romanzo criminale: la serie (Sky/Cattleya, 2008–2010), such a practice seeks ‘un certo effetto di autenticità, un simulacro dell’essenzialismo fisiognomico pasoliniano’ in which ‘l’avere volti sconosciuti, o comunque non familiari per gli spettatori, ha permesso agli attori di ottenere autenticità spaziale e temporale a livello narrativo’(O’Rawe, 2015: 44–45).

This nostalgia for working-class (or in Pasolini’s case subproletariat) authenticity is rendered spatially also during the couple’s visit to the Roman forum. Gina tells Marco that her father would play football in the forum when his family lived in the formerly working-class district of Trastevere in Rome. The couple break into the forum, rather than buying tickets, as if to reclaim what is rightfully theirs, and this is the location of their first ‘real’ kiss, as if to underline again a hankering after an ancient, more authentic ‘Roman’ space. Unlike the other spaces of central Rome in the film, saturated with tourists, the forum is improbably empty, as if to convey their right to possession over it. Conversely, the film suggests that both characters suffer from a sense of displacement in the suburbs. Although they live there, their only reference point seems to be the ring road as they blunder through that misunderstanding over him living inside it, and her just outside it, which Gina reads as an insult. As their day progresses, they then get lost looking for her sports center, located she says in ‘uno spiazzale tipo questo,’ indicating the anonymous intersection they have stopped at. As I shall discuss later, the Rome of this film emerges as a series of what Marc Augé (2008) has described as a series of non-places, and the characters drift through them struggling to find a sense of place. However, this apocalyptic and potentially naive condemnation of the space of Rome as lost to its ‘real’ inhabitants is complicated by the ways, fleeting as they may be, in which Gina and Marco occupy that space.

Consumption after girl power and Pretty Woman

The rise and fall of orthodoxies litter human history, and yet our collective imagination pins us firmly to the present. We behave and plan only for more of the same. There is no space, in this model, for a post-capitalist society, a place where the superfluity of consumer goods allows us to direct our energies away from the consumption of commodities towards other – potentially more purposeful – activities. (Lewis, 2013: 3)

Made in 2012, it is worth highlighting the fact that this film came at a moment of particular crisis in the West, beginning with the global financial crisis that started in 2007, a crisis that was and continues to be keenly felt in Italy, particularly by the young, among whom unemployment has rocketed. Anti-consumerist critics, like Lewis, see this as a moment that opens up consideration of alternative possibilities, what Pasolini might have described as ‘fireflies.’ These are ‘fireflies’ that, Didi-Huberman has argued, have in fact always remained visible, even if they will only be: ‘des signaux, des singularités, des bribes, des éclairs passagers, même faiblement lumineux’ (Didi-Huberman, 2009: 36). Despite being saturated in a post-Pasolinian cultural imaginary, we might ask whether the film’s coincidence with this financial crunch-point also helps it to show traces of those remaining fireflies and that opening. I would like to discuss first, however, how the relationship between this economic and political situation in the context of postfeminism temporarily pulls us in the opposite direction: toward consumption.

The girl is the ideal subject of consumer capitalism, because she is ‘becoming’ and therefore open to the potential for constant self-improvement. While the young woman or girl has typically been associated with the negative aspects of mass consumption berated by Pasolini, this notion has been shaped more positively by postfeminist culture. Some critics have suggested that it also enables a space for female play, as Sue Thornham (1997: 15) writes: ‘It [postfeminism] is a feminism grounded in consumption as play.’ Charlotte Brunsdon (1997) sees Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990) as a key text in this evolution of feminism, claiming that ‘Pretty Woman is pretty because she shops.’ For Brunsdon, Vivian’s shopping is a form of popular feminism, whether or not we like it:

Precisely because this postmodern girl is a figure partly constructed through a relation to consumption, the positionality is more available. She is in this sense much more like the postmodern feminist, for she is neither trapped in femininity (pre-feminist), nor rejecting of it (feminist). She can use it. (Brunsdon, 1997: 87)

The tension between these two views of girls and consumption comes to the fore through the figure of the working-class girl. In many respects, postfeminism as consumption both invites and excludes working-class girls from its discourse, particularly from the ‘luminosities’ of ‘girl power’:

It is these girls, in particular, who must reconcile a Girl Power discourse that tells them they can be and do whatever they want in a labor market that cruelly sets limits on any ambition and an education system that classifies the majority of them as only fit for low-end, poorly paid work. Neoliberal discourse, stressing success as a feature of individual effort, leaves these girls few other explanations for their lack of success except for their own individual failings. The relentless calls to remake oneself primarily by purchasing products imbued with Girl Power and the right therapeutic services to shore up self-esteem also excludes these girls from comfortably inhabiting the idealized feminine position achieved by ‘consuming oneself into being.’ (Gonick, 2006: 16)

Although based on a uniquely Italian case of political corruption, showing Gina’s recourse to sexual exchange as a means of accessing a discourse of success, Comencini underlines the difficulty of any access to success for working-class girls. Of course, the motif of prostitution as a way of talking about the sale of everything is hardly new – it is a powerful and problematic metaphor that runs the risk of simplifying our understanding of sex work as labor. However, the particular circumstances of Gina’s exchange are grounded in a certain political problem (the Rai Fiction scandal) and make explicit that she is only exchanging the favors toward another end – one that is not directly associated with income or material acquisition at all, but with her desire to act, and only indirectly her desire to earn money.

Kim Humphrey has observed that critiques of consumerism often end up taking a moralizing stance toward the consumer, and although Comencini is aligned with a potentially moralizing feminism in her association with ‘Se non ora quando,’ her film’s engagement with areas of constraint through the perspective of the girl does attempt to move beyond a Manichean vision of what a feminist looks like, and to critique consumerism without blaming the individuals (Humphrey, 2010: 7). On the one hand, I read this in terms of Gina’s attempted re-negotiation of the ‘girl power’ brand dynamic, although that ultimately fails to protect her, reminding us that we exist in a ‘post-girl power moment’ (Gonick et al., 2009). In this we see a sympathy for a culture in which self-branding appears essential, as described by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012: 77): ‘a desire to be noticed or recognized is perhaps the quintessential element to the branded postfeminist self; this desire mobilizes young women to “come forward” as feminism “fades away.”’ Over the course of the day, with her happy exchange of high heels for Converse boots, and the inscription of her body with tattoos of powerful symbols (a shark alongside the more typically feminine butterfly), Gina attempts to perform a different kind of femininity, in conflict with that imposed by her mother and her mysterious agent. The difficulty of acting outside consumer capitalism is foregrounded here, since in both these instances Gina is still shopping. Performance is central to Gina’s persona as a budding actress, and Comencini does not reject this aspect of Gina but makes it an important and engaging aspect of her personality. That shopping is an aspect of this performance is an inevitable feature of postfeminist culture. It is in this respect that Comencini’s approach comes much closer to Kearney’s reading of girls’ adaptive strategies and moves away from what the latter describes as ‘feminists’ abjection of femininity’ (Kearney, 2015: 8). Her approach here even acknowledges the possibilities of what Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser (2012: 3) describe as ‘commodity activism,’ new ways of reading the relationship between shopping and politics that ‘challenge the idea that hard-and-fast certainties separate capitalist power and popular resistance.’ Gina’s embrace of a certain style can be read here as a form of popular resistance to restrictive images of femininity. In this respect, Comencini acknowledges that:

As the neoliberal moment is witness to ever-sharper delineations of the marketplace as constitutive of our political imaginaries, our identities, rights and ideologies are ever more precisely formulated within the logics of consumption and commodification rather than in opposition to them. (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 8–9)

Indeed, we see Gina both engaging in the pleasures of window-shopping and ‘commodity activism’ of sorts, as well as voicing a critique of shopping as leisure, which aligns her with critics of consumerism. ⁴ Through Gina, the film also offers a commentary on how the redundancy of shopping as leisure becomes manifest during the ‘credit crunch.’ Sitting under the faux classical dome of a peripheral shopping center, Gina questions why anyone comes to a shopping center when they do not have money, highlighting the anti-consumerist nature of Comencini’s vision and suggesting that Gina is on her own journey toward resistance. This culminates in Gina becoming an ‘anti-shopper,’ and opens up the film to a world that is also post-girl power and thus post-Pretty Woman. In a central scene, after admiring the clothes in its shop window, Gina playfully enters an Alberta Ferretti boutique, where she tricks the shop assistants in order to steal a dress. In a chase down Rome’s exclusive Via Condotti, she throws it into the air, where its magnificent purple voile is shot falling in slow motion, as Gina shouts ‘fuck off’ to the stupified shop assistants and runs off hand in hand with Marco to a popular upbeat song on the soundtrack. Like Vivian in Pretty Woman, she gets one over on the shop assistants in the end, but by rejecting nice clothes, not buying them. Thus play and consumption are re-configured for the girl. At the same time, we might note that since Alberta Ferretti willingly participated in this scene, the film itself engages in a form of ‘commodity activism’ that simultaneously celebrates Gina’s agency and promotes the fashion house as one willing to embrace such revolutionary potential; this scene then is also ‘a trenchant reminder that there is no “outside” to the logics of contemporary capital’ (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 2).

As we see in a restaurant scene, located in the top-notch central Roman restaurant, Gusto, there is another Pretty Woman-reversal, in which it is Marco who flicks his lobster across the restaurant just as Vivian accidentally flicks her snail off her plate in a similarly up-market restaurant in Pretty Woman. Although it is the prostitute-girl who knows how to eat in a restaurant and her possible romantic partner who does not, the scene is not about one of them learning to fit in and thus realizing the romance. Rather than obscuring the economic stakes of romantic fine dining, fetishized as a basic trope of contemporary romance, the film lays these structures bare. ⁵ Gina knows how to eat lobster because she has been taught by the ‘agency’ that aims to pimp her out. Marco’s ineptitude reminds us that there is no older Richard Gere figure on standby with a rescue fantasy; indeed Gina only has power because older men have delegated it to her at the price of her sexual agency. Thus Gina might allude to a possible romance between them, but Marco does not know whether it is for real. Girl power has its limits, its moment has gone, and there is no return to the romcom. At the end of the film Marco attempts to repair Gina’s broken shoes, but he has misread the situation; jumping on his Vespa and packing the shoes into his rucksack, he grasps at the old fairytale model of Pretty Woman, but it no longer has any purchase.

Consuming Rome: Performance, pleasure, and popular culture

Pretty Woman has been screened 24 times by Rai1 since its release in Italy in the summer of 1990, still attracting over 4 million viewers on its most recent screening, confirming the popularity of this postfeminist text for Italian culture (Negri, 2015: 25). Thus the restaurant is one of many sites in the film that draws upon a different, but equally powerful cultural pole to that of Pasolini’s Rome: that of popular culture, particularly Hollywood. Comencini is exploiting the potential of the girl and discourses of girl power, so obviously interpolated by global capitalism, to bring Italian culture out of its apocalyptic self-reflexivity. In this section I will examine how the film’s use of place, or rather non-place, also undermines the vision of Rome as a space of lost authenticity, and instead presents it as a place in which authenticity and artifice are so entangled that performance itself becomes a tool that the individual can use to engage with ‘the power of authenticity’ (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 5) and attempt to shape meaning out of his or her existence. Not all performances, the film suggests, are equally repellent. Here Comencini moves toward a reading of girl performance in which ‘although aspects of femininity are taken on as practices of the self, they are still mutable, dynamic, immanent, and open to transformation’ (Gonick et al., 2009: 6).

If there are moments in which the film appears to hark back to an Edenic working-class Rome, whether in the bucolic peripheries or the working-class center, as I suggested above, more powerfully the city emerges as a series of ‘non-places.’ Here I use Marc Augé’s definition: ‘if a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé, 2008: 63). As endless melancholic shots from the car window in the first part of the film suggest, whilst the pair drive around the suburbs, this ring road could be anywhere. A particularly telling shot of the Las Vegas Story café, a reference to the ultimate non-place, underlines this. Through the peripheral non-places that Gina and Marco visit (to while away the day they agree that they will take turns to choose a place to visit), the characters, increasingly confident in one another’s company, appear to learn to impose their own interpretations and insist on the ‘everyday’ meaning of these spaces, reclaiming them for their own ends, even in the face of the anxiety they initially create. The first place they visit is a sports center, where Gina appears to wish to watch a synchronized swimming contest. The anonymity of the place itself (‘in uno spiazzale tipo questo’) is reinforced by the uniformity of the performing girls, whose disciplined homogeneity forms part of a threat, reinforced by the judgmental gaze of the audience itself on Gina’s outlandishly elaborate dress, that triggers a panic attack. The panic attack is averted by Marco’s touching offer of one of his mother’s enormous home-made sandwiches, emphasizing the rooting of individual stories with which these characters repeatedly counter the anonymity of these spaces.

Marco also finds himself temporarily floored by his own choice of location: the bowling alley. Usually let in for free, because the staff know his mother, he finds himself charged the full amount, now that he has a job. If Marco is rendered anonymous by his insertion into the machinery of labor and consumption, Gina performs a rescue of sorts when he spots an ex-girlfriend there, and Gina ‘fakes’ a passionate kiss to restore his damaged honor, appearing to recognize his individuality again. The complex personal stories that underlie these ‘non-places’ also come to the fore in Gina’s choice of a visit to the peripheral shopping center, since, unknown to Marco, it is in this shopping center that her mother works as a beautician. In a private moment Gina observes her mother at work through the beautician’s window without making her aware of her presence; Gina’s silent departure from the window suggests a distance from her mother engendered both by the alienating space itself and her mother’s determination that Gina will proceed with her mission, both linked to ideals of a certain kind of consumption that Gina is challenging. Once again, the commercial center is collapsed with the figure of the mother, who serves its mission, and seems to have bought into its soulless ethic. At the same time, the space itself opens up a moment for a glimpse into Gina’s truly felt anxiety and loneliness. It also becomes one in which Gina and Marco find ways to playfully flirt and engage with one another as they attempt to get the fish in a pet-shop tank to follow their fingers across the glass, as Gina seeks distractions from her anxiety (referencing a famous romantic scene from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, 1996). Gina is the one who manages to get the fish to follow the movement of her fingers on the glass, reinforcing a more general association between her and nature, but it is also typical of her playful caprice, juxtaposed with Marco’s slower solidity. It is an unusual pairing for Italian cinema, in which it is the women who tend to occupy a much less expressive peripheral role, and it serves to highlight Gina’s mercurial vivacity, with elements of engaging unpredictability of flight, that lend themselves to reading her as a metaphorical firefly.

If the first half of the film takes place in the suburbs, between anonymous sports centers, bowling allies, and shopping malls, interspersed with rare vestiges of ‘nature,’ the second half is spent in the center of Rome, taking in the key sites of tourist Rome, from the Spanish Steps to the Pantheon and the Roman Forum. This crowded Rome, shown as almost permanently subject to flashing cameras and the tourist gaze, is one also subject to a blurring of boundaries between center and periphery. Stephanie Malia Hom (2010a) has shown how the capital itself has become a museum, preserved and recreated for, as well as consumed by, the tourist gaze. Effectively the film’s protagonists move from one shopping center to another, as they now peruse the shops of Via Condotti. The emphasis on shopping and tourism makes this another non-place, confirming Augé’s reading that:

supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairian modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of “places of memory”, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. (Augé, 2008: 63)

When Gina and Marco challenge this ‘preservation’ of Rome as site of consumption or false spectacle, for example when they break into the forum rather than paying for entry, they reach moments of connection. As mentioned above, this is the scene of their first ‘real’ kiss. Following her brazen theft of a dress from Alberta Ferretti, Gina performs Scarlett O’Hara’s concluding lines from Gone with the Wind on the Roman steps. Men dressed as Roman soldiers lurk in the background, and their absurdity strikes a chord that serves to highlight Gina’s performed feeling: a girl longing for a tomorrow and an elsewhere. Thus throughout the film, performance itself is fraught with moments of slippage between authenticity and artifice. Indeed, when Gina opens her eyes to look upon the security guards from Alberta Ferretti, who have tracked her down, we are reminded that in this tourist recreation of Rome, as Hom argues in her work on the simulacrum of Italy, ‘everyday practices of power’ are ‘covered up by a patina of leisure’ (Hom, 2010b: 396). In both of these instances of rebellion, Comencini reinterprets typical gestures of ‘ribellione sessantottina,’ attaching them instead to characters who have nothing to do with the traditionally Italian left-wing form of commitment, as if to reconceptualize our notion of what a rebel, or a ‘firefly,’ looks like. Here too, her film comes close to the admission that ‘the tactics of social and political critique appear to survive as little more than diverting spectacles, neither mainstream nor leftist approaches to activism, appear to escape the paradigmatic force of Neoliberal capital’ (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 2).

Through these moments of connection, through friendship and romance, and through narrative attention itself, the discourse of aspiration and gloss begins to come unstuck. The status of popular cultural references in shaking up certainties of the Rome-related apocalyptic imaginary is central here. Alongside Pretty Woman, Roman Holiday (Wyler, 1953) is another key intertext in this process, one offering a vision of feminine pleasure and flânerie – a portrait of a woman whose sentiments are restrained by her position as Princess (Audrey Hepburn), whose body is constrained by duty, but who nonetheless evades total discipline. Gina too occupies a kind of gilded cage, but like Princess Ann, she too can find in the space of Rome, tourist postcard that it may be, a moment of escape, a Deleuzian ‘line of flight,’ as I have argued elsewhere (Hipkins, 2015). The film echoes this through the women’s appropriation of vehicles – for a moment Gina becomes the driver of Marco’s official car, just as Ann takes off on the Vespa of journalist Joe (Gregory Peck). If Princess Ann has her hair cut short, a statement about repossessing her body, Gina takes the more contemporary move of getting a shark tattooed on her neck. Such pleasures of transgression are in both cases made possible by sympathetic male characters, themselves also on the margins, barely employed, from Joe’s down-at-heel foreign correspondent to Marco’s son of a (single mother?) cleaner on his first (and only) day of employment. In both films the couples use Rome as a stage and enjoy creating a spectacle for the tourists, also celebrating its potential as a site of performance.

In the film’s ending we are far from the conservative and fairly serene embrace of duty that comes at the end of Roman Holiday as Ann returns to her royal duties, shedding a discreet tear for love left behind. Un giorno speciale suggests instead a discourse ‘against aspiration.’ ⁶ If Marco’s character initially apes the discourse of self-made man, even down to his teenage transformative diet that took him from the label of ‘tricheco squartato’ to attractive, suited young driver, it was really his mum who got him his job. Marco’s changing relationship with his car becomes an index of a value shift for him. In the penultimate scene, after he has driven Gina home, both of them speechless with rage and confusion over what has happened to her, his new colleagues challenge him about a scratch on the car. Marco turns on them and adds a proper scratch as he keys the car and then tears off his tie, symbol of his subservience to the political regime, and quits his job. His aggression with the keys echoes Gina’s moment with the dress, as both characters turn on the symptoms of their oppression.

Conclusion: Of postfeminist girls and fireflies

When the Cinderella plot comes undone, as Marco is left holding Gina’s glittering shoe, hopes for a romantic ending are frustrated and Gina stares into the television screen unwilling to respond to Marco’s voice; however, there is a glimmer of hope in this ending. What Marco has done to his car he has learnt from Gina, rejecting his own complicity in her exploitation. It is in this that Francesca Comencini takes the greatest distance from any moralizing stance on consumerism. Gina’s own eclectic brand of ‘resistance’ has crossed between a new form of commodity activism, in her choice of shoes and tattoos, and forms of rebellion that reject the idea of consumerism altogether. In some ways, this tension speaks to our present moment in which we stand on the brink of new ways of perceiving the relationship between consumerism and resistance, and seek a new language for describing them (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: ix). The persistent influence of ‘l’articolo delle lucciole’ in Italian culture has created a kind of discursive fog which paradoxically renders the fireflies of Italian culture all the more difficult to perceive. Through the thicket of this Rome-related apocalyptic imaginary, however, Comencini manages to create enough space for the character of Gina to emerge like the intermittent light of those fireflies, and to be a light that guides another person. To paraphrase Didi-Huberman’s question in the opening quotation to this article, can we not see fireflies because we are not looking in the right place? Is the ‘girl’ herself a potential firefly? If so, perhaps the Italian cultural mainstream cannot see the fireflies because it does not know where to look for them.