Representing postpartum depression in contemporary cinema: Cristina Comencini’s Quando la notte and Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te

Abstract

This article aims to analyze Quando la notte, Cristina Comencini’s 2011 film, and Tutto parla di te, Alina Marazzi’s 2012 first fictional film. Both directors explore some of the problematic emotions that characterize motherhood, and challenge the traditional way of thinking about maternity by offering a reflection on identity, solitude, and solidarity, and by representing how the conflict between fear of the unknown and knowledge can be unraveled by the disclosure of the past into the present. Comencini develops a female stance that hints at a re-appropriation of identity and the assertion of female pleasure. Marazzi builds a choral representation of a female symbolic order, intertwining personal and public spaces and fulfilling the director’s desire to redeem the figure of her own mother.

Keywords

Alina Marazzi Cristina Comencini identity maternity postpartum depression social expectations

The subject of maternity has received renewed attention in the past two decades within the Italian cultural context. Many women writers and directors have engaged in the complex task of representing crucial issues of identity and motherhood, and have disclosed a new gap between the values embedded in the culture of society and women’s individual experiences. In the 21st century literary and cinematographic production, this fracture emerges through the voices of women who struggle to balance life and career; it surfaces through the stories of marginalized women who reject motherhood a priori or, on the contrary, desire maternity at all costs and turn to reproductive technologies or surrogate mothers;¹ it is unveiled by the need to acknowledge problems such as baby blues, postpartum depression,² infanticide, and all the conditions that might compromise the relationship between a mother and her child.³

In their films Quando la notte (2011) and Tutto parla di te (2012), filmmakers Cristina Comencini and Alina Marazzi respectively display their uneasiness with the maternal role by questioning the conventional understanding of the experience of maternity, which does not always coincide with the most beautiful time in a woman’s life. Comencini’s film presents the story of a woman struggling to cope alone with her one-and-a-half year old son; Marazzi investigates stories of women who suffer from postpartum depression. This article examines the techniques employed by the two Italian directors whose very different cinematographic languages challenge the traditional way of thinking about maternity. The focus will be on how the directors explore the problematic emotions that characterize motherhood, including the contrasting feelings of solitude and solidarity and how both Comencini and Marazzi develop a female stance that hints at a re-appropriation of identity: the former through the assertion of female pleasure, and the latter through a choral representation of a female symbolic order.

In Italy, maternity is simultaneously idealized and neglected. Italian society is rooted in the idea of an archetypal female disposition to “nurture, protect, and love” (Valcarenghi, 2011: IX); maternity is largely perceived as the realm of pure “happiness and generosity” (Valcarenghi, 2011: 3).⁴ Nevertheless, sociologists and researchers such as Donata Gottardi and Catia Iori (2015)⁵ have used the term island to describe the isolation, solitude, and fears of women’s maternal condition, and denounce an overall inability to envision maternity as an important social issue. Maternity remains a woman’s question,⁶ and the separation between the individual and society does not simply emerge in the lack of institutional support, or the lack of stability at the workplace, but also in women’s difficulty not only to face but also to express the challenges that come with their new or aspiring maternal role, within their family or circle of friends.⁷

Quando la notte and Tutto parla di te certainly echo the words of Adrienne Rich⁸ on the institutionalized perspective of motherhood. Indeed, by revealing the hidden side of the pain, fragility, pressure, and conflicts of maternity, Comencini’s and Marazzi’s films represent on screen what Rich once called “anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom” (Rich, 1986: 15). It has not been only recently that Italian women have found the words to talk about the “taboos” and the “masks” that Adrienne Rich gives voice to. As Laura Benedetti has demonstrated, 20th century women’s literature offers many examples of female protagonists who overcome the stereotypical and mythical representations of women “trapped in a web of symbolic associations” (Benedetti, 2007: 4) to the sacrificial Virgin Mary or the powerful Medea. In her text Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema, Margo Cottino-Jones (2010) has also illustrated how Italian cinema provides numerous examples of female protagonists who resist a traditional codification of “good” or “bad,”⁹ and challenge “the dominant, conservative masculine point of view … by decentering the masculinity and highlighting the female potential” (Cottino-Jones, 2010: 5). This article cannot offer an exhaustive account of the many male and female directors who have offered representations of women able to confront traditional gender roles and family life within the history of Italian cinema. That said, it is important to contextualize Quando la notte and Tutto parla di te in the light of contemporary Italian literature and cinema to understand how innovative and non-mainstream these films really are. Comencini’s and Marazzi’s concern with postpartum depression has no antecedents in Italy.

In Lost Diva – Found Woman, Rada Bieberstein (2009) claims that women still appear “mostly in the roles of mother and wife, daughter and best friend, placed in the private spheres of family and friendship” (Bieberstein, 2009: 382). However, films such as L’amore molesto, Quo vadis, baby?, La bestia nel cuore, Pani e tulipani, La finestra di fronte, and Le fate ignoranti, just to mention a few, offer several examples of female characters in what Bierberstein calls a “process of individuation” (Bieberstein, 2009: 385), enabling the protagonists to change from an initial “attempt to live up to social standards and expectations marginalizing many aspects of their personality” (Bieberstein, 2009: 385) to a new condition of self-awareness that makes them agents and subjects rather than objects. Although a direct line stretches from the above films to Quando la notte and Tutto parla di te that traces the female desire for self-realization and self-expression, it is important to underscore that Comencini’s and Marazzi’s films broaden their scope to include maternal vulnerability and problematize the complexity of postpartum depression. With the exception in other media of Grazia Verasani’s (2004) theatrical drama From Medea: Maternity Blues,¹⁰ adapted for the screen by Fabrizio Cattani eight years later (Maternity Blues, 2012), and Concita De Gregorio’s (2006) text Una madre lo sa. Tutte le ombre dell’amore perfetto, Comencini’s and Marazzi’s films both represent something completely new.

When From Medea premiered in October 2002, the exploitation coverage in the news media of the “Caso Cogne”¹¹ was underway. Verasani openly criticized the manipulation of the media, the knee-jerk nature of the judgments that generally characterizes episodes of filicide, compared to the complexity that lay behind the action of Medea. While some mothers do become guilty of monstrous actions, Verasani reflects on the responsibilities of a system that confines women to being mothers, and is unable to perceive their solitude and fragility as a product of their social and cultural environment.¹² In her collection of short stories inspired by the experiences of real women, Concita De Gregorio (2006) continued Verasani’s work reflecting on the perception of motherhood and the action of Medea and clarifying that “monsters” are not simply the mothers who kill their children and/or themselves, but those mothers/women who surround them in the community, those who are nearby but do not do enough to help or understand.

The “Caso Cogne” certainly affected Verasani’s and De Gregorio’s works, and its echo still resonates in Cristina Comencini’s and Alina Marazzi’s films as one of their cultural inter-texts. While Verasani’s and Cattani’s protagonists are convicted of infanticide and serve their time in prison, Comencini and Marazzi do not venture into life after a murder, but focus instead on the solitude embedded in the new maternal experience.

Three recent films by major male auteurs also and inevitably come to mind when contextualizing Comencini’s and Marazzi’s work: Nanni Moretti’s Mia madre (2015), Marco Bellocchio’s Fai bei sogni (2016), and Paolo Virzì’s La pazza gioia (2016). The drama of Moretti’s film is in the solitude of characters who seem to be unknown to each other. But the roles in which the two women protagonists appear (Margherita the moviemaker, daughter, and mother; and Ada the old mother and retired Latin teacher, who is dying of an incurable illness) focus on the more traditional topic of the complexity of family ties, and the guilt of failed relationships. In Bellocchio’s latest film, the mother’s suicide, clearly caused by unhappiness in her marital and maternal roles, remains completely veiled and in the background, while in the foreground the film focuses on the exploration of the son’s traumatic maternal loss. Bellocchio’s investigation of the maternal from the child’s perspective takes the film in a different direction from the pioneering cinematographic work on motherhood of Comencini and Marazzi. Virzì’s film offers a very courageous investigation of the maternal experience through the character of Donatella Morelli. Yet, the revelation of her attempted suicide and filicide appears to be caused by a depression related to unreciprocated love rather than postpartum depression. This is not to say, of course, that all films are now obligated to address female postpartum depression when representing maternity; at the same time, however, films like Mia madre, Fai bei sogni, and La pazza gioia underscore the rarity of such works and make them worthy of analysis.

Introducing the works of Cristina Comencini and Alina Marazzi

As Flavia Laviosa has noted, Cristina Comencini’s works have always delved into the private space of the individual: “la regista,” she writes, “preferisce raccontare il lato nascosto della laicità italiana, vuole approfondire i temi intimi e privati più scottanti della società contemporanea” (Laviosa, 2009: 541). In the interview conducted by Laviosa, Comencini also explains her specific desire to investigate the tensions that characterize the family:

ho sempre avuto la sensazione di poter raccontare bene la famiglia perché conosco le sfumature dei rapporti, l’odio e l’amore e come tutto questo si incrocia … La famiglia è forse la cosa che più si desidera, ma anche la più difficile da avere. Per questo mi sembra molto importante raccontarne le evoluzioni ed è sempre presente nei miei libri e nei miei film. (Laviosa, 2009: 545)

Indeed, many of her films, from Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (1995) to Matrimoni (1998), Il più bel giorno della mia vita (2002), and La bestia nel cuore (2005), focus on the multiple aspects of family relationships and communication. Quando la notte confirms Comencini’s inclination to present the “burning” topics of family and human relations. Central in the film is the female protagonist’s isolation and solitude, her difficulties in managing her days of vacation without somebody’s help, and the male protagonist’s anger that embodies both the pain of his personal experience and the expectations of society. Through characters, setting, music, and editing, Comencini’s film questions the traditional understanding of maternity as a phase of pure “happiness and generosity.”

Quando la notte was first written as a novel by Comencini and published in 2009 (Comencini, 2009). The film based on the book was released two years later, in 2011.¹³ The first screening at the Venice Film Festival triggered scornful reactions, and some critics labeled it weak and “unconvincing.”¹⁴ Nevertheless, the film received international award nominations, and confirmed the filmmaker’s desire to engage “in a political critique of patriarchal attitudes and institutions that resist change” (Luciano and Scarparo, 2013: 195).¹⁵

The director gives her film a circular structure that reflects the perpetual cycle of women’s lives in their constant struggle to balance maternal duties and individuality. However, the film also overcomes that sense of no escape from a woman’s maternal duty (that is, a woman is first a mother and then a woman). Indeed, by showing the viewer a strong protagonist, who is searching for the affirmation of her own self as a woman, both at the beginning and at the end, and by making the story of her maternal difficulties a long flashback, the director subverts the discourse constructed around the maternal, and develops a female stance that points to a sense of re-appropriation of identity. However, an overall sense of pessimism remains, and the last encounter between the woman and the man protagonists shows the provisional nature of their relationship.

Released in 2012, Tutto parla di te is Alina Marazzi’s first fictional film. The director earned acclaim with Un’ora sola ti vorrei (2002), Per sempre (2005), and Vogliamo anche le rose (2007), and her innovative filmography has contributed immensely to changing the landscape of the Italian documentary genre since the early 1990s. The hybrid style of her experimental documentaries combines archival footage with film footage, images, animation, letters, and interviews. Her work becomes a powerful collage that aims to provide a new representation of and a new look on women’s lives. As Maura Bergonzoni rightly notes, the editing of images and footage “interplays with the editing of sounds, interviews and voice-over, all of which work as a counterpart to the images themselves, underlining or undermining what the viewer sees” (Bergonzoni, 2011: 251).¹⁶

Tutto parla di te diverges from Marazzi’s previous production insofar as it adds fictional components to the plot. At the same time, the film echoes the innovative filmmaking language of her documentaries.¹⁷ The director employs photography, animation, archival footage, and interviews, but she also creates disorienting editing transitions, and uses a voice-over narration that, combined with the images, is evocative of the characters’ pasts, their inner feelings, and their fragmentation.

In Tutto parla di te, Marazzi explores the question of postpartum depression by juxtaposing the stories of two women, Emma and Pauline, but also by entangling the story of Pauline with the accounts of other real women who appear in video-recorded interviews, women who, just like Emma and the director’s mother, Liseli, felt inadequate in their maternal role. The film, then, becomes a choral and philosophical representation of a female symbolic order of the mother that calls for something very similar to the entrustment sought by Luisa Muraro, a symbolic order that “turns the relationship between women into the basis for female freedom” (Muraro, 1996: 14).

Balancing love and rejection in Cristina Comencini’s Quando la notte

Marina and Manfred are the main protagonists of Quando la notte. Marina is a young woman who is vacationing for three weeks in a northern village of the Dolomites with her son, Marco. Manfred is a solitary mountain guide, abandoned by his mother at the age of 10.

Both Manfred and Marina’s husband adopt a patriarchal stance. The latter remains an unknown figure and a silent voice we hear only when he telephones her. The protagonist confesses that her husband has high expectations of her: “Mio marito si aspetta molto da me.” He expects Marina to conform to her established role of bourgeois stay-at-home wife and mother. Manfred embodies the common male voice that decides what is good and what is bad, and feels that Marina is not a good mother, just like his own, who abandoned the family to elope with an American man.

Marina stands for a different logic and perspective: she confesses the pain that her role is causing, and understands her need to have a life beside her maternal role. Initially, she can only tell her son about her desire to go back to work after the summer: but her words remain a monologue, confined in the dark symbolic room where the scene is shot. Later, however, she is able to voice her anxiety and wrongdoing to Bianca, Manfred’s sister in law, when she admits her difficulties in coping with the baby: “Tutti pensano che sia cosi facile, perché nessuno lo dice come è veramente,” and to Manfred, when she confesses her violence toward the child. Interestingly, the director cuts the moment in which Marina is most violent to the child: Comencini’s visual choices de-center the viewers from the violence of the dramatic act, and while the use of parallel editing and flashback sequences still retains violent sensations, the viewers are compelled to reflect on the complexity of the protagonist’s conflicting emotions, rather than the gesture reached at the peak of her exasperation.

Comencini’s setting is staged to represent Marina’s malaise, and to subvert the joy and serenity usually associated with maternity.¹⁸ When the employee of the rental agency takes Marina to the house and tells her that the location is “solo silenzio e natura,” the camera zooms out from a medium shot of the two women in the street so that the giant mountains that surround the little village gradually overshadow Marina; the dusk scenery is breathtaking, but the image projects a strong sense of isolation and impotence, and the viewer perceives the oppressive power of nature. In a sense, the shot becomes a parallel to the complicated emotions of motherhood: the tension between the power to give life, and Marina’s powerlessness as a new mother. Another glimpse into the multi-layered aspects of motherhood emerges when Marina leaves her sleeping baby in the stroller outside the house, and starts dancing and singing while cooking dinner over the music of Gianna Nannini’s popular song Fotoromanza. Nannini’s song originally addresses a man, but in the film the metaphors of love as a gas chamber and poisonous ice cream reflect Marina’s sense of suffocation and intoxication as a mother.

Marina seems content and in control of her and her child’s life until the rain forces her to stay inside the house. Her sense of estrangement emerges in a sequence of claustrophobic narrative technique. Inside the dark apartment, the clock is ticking, the rain is pouring against the windowpane, the baby is crying; the camera slowly pans to a cluttered floor covered with abandoned toys, revealing how much time Marina has spent to entertain Marco. In the end, she sits on the floor, and while she falls into a deep sleep, the baby climbs a chair and reaches a mantel full of bottles, creating a sense of unease for viewers. But the camera cuts to Manfred’s bedroom, located on the ground floor of the same house and we do not see what happens next. Manfred hears the bottles that shatter on the floor, the baby crying, Marina’s screams, and a sudden thud, before everything falls into a deep silence. The camera cuts back to Marina’s apartment, the room is silent and dark, and Marina sits on the floor unable to react.

By cross-cutting back and forth between the two scenes, Comencini achieves different results: first, she stresses the juxtaposition between the two characters; second, she intensifies the level of suspense that characterizes the action (only at the end of the film does the viewer discover what Marina did to her son); third, she represents the degree of discomfort and misunderstanding that is inherent in the mother’s action. The latter is probably the most important point: by featuring parallel editing, and by not revealing what happens in the apartment, Comencini plays with the idea of the audience hearing off-screen sounds, but denies us sight of the visual source of the noises. The acousmatic sounds recall the ideas expressed by De Gregorio in her text Una madre lo sa, when she reflects on women surrounded by people (family or friends) who are unable to really see and understand the cause of their distress: as the sounds remain beyond the visual space, the pain remains beyond comprehension. This also creates a parallel between Marina’s early inability to openly voice her actions and the hidden feeling of maternal unease as a woman’s problem. Women with postpartum depression, moreover, often describe their condition by reporting that their minds seem to be filled with cobwebs and fogginess, so it is possible to interpret the cut as a way to parallel the temporary lack of control that women might experience.¹⁹

When the protagonists are rushing to the nearest hospital in Manfred’s car, and while they are at the hospital, the director employs a shot/reverse shot pattern that intensifies the psychological apartness of the two characters. It is very clear that Manfred dislikes Marina and does not understand her behavior, as it is very clear that Marina is hiding something and is too afraid to tell the truth about her actions and feelings. Their conflict is later emphasized by a unified two-shot (rare throughout the film), during a hike to Manfred’s family lodge. Here, as he confronts her again about the night of the accident, the closeness of the protagonists’ faces as they appear in the frame only strengthens their antagonism.

The ambiguity that characterizes Marina’s experience as a mother, her love and hostility toward her son, is suddenly replaced by the physical loss of the child when, during the hike, Manfred quickly disappears with the baby on his shoulder. The camera mimics Marina’s panic by zooming out and offering a high shot of her as she slowly becomes very small among the massive mountains. Marina seems to perceive a new sense of self-understanding by realizing how strong her love for the child is. Her lonely walk toward the lodge is also followed by a provocative flashback sequence that shows Manfred’s brother, Albert, sucking his wife’s breast because their newborn baby is unable to latch. Comencini is not interested in sexualizing the act of breastfeeding, but focuses on representing the intimacy of the couple, and the husband’s desire to relieve his wife from the pain emerges as an attempt to represent a distinctive paternal model. The flashback intensifies the director’s desire to overcome taboos and common misconceptions by challenging the common understanding of both the marital and maternal bond.

Once Marina realizes the normalcy of her feelings, she is able to overcome the anxiety she feels when she is alone with her son and the fear of Manfred. She openly confesses for the first time what she did to her son. Interestingly, before Marina enters the room where Manfred is recovering from a late night accident in the mountains, Comencini offers a shot of her walking by the painting of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. The same painting had also appeared in a previous scene when Marco had initially been hospitalized. The image reflects the traditional male gaze of the mother and child, the sense of devoted “stereotyped self-sacrifice” (Cavarero, 2009: 27) that maternity entails, but here it serves as a counterpoint to Marina’s feelings, by anticipating her desire to reveal the difference of her unsettling condition.²⁰

In the room, Marina says:

Non sono una buona madre, lo amo ma mi capita di odiarlo, certe volte vorrei andarmene, lasciarlo a qualcuno, essere di nuovo libera. Ma lui piange se non mi vede. Non so cosa mi è successo quella notte, mi sono addormentata … ha cominciato a piangere, quando piange non smette più, un pianto che ti buca il cervello, ho sentito dentro di me una violenza terribile, credo di averlo …

The camera cuts from a medium close-up of Marina to a flashback of the night of the accident: the viewer sees a slightly blurry medium shot of the mother facing the camera, holding the baby and shaking him. During the flashback, Marina is unable to give voice to her actions, and it remains unclear whether she drops or throws the child.

Comencini’s film is an attempt to comprehend emotions, a film of understanding, which reflects on what is before and beyond the camera without pursuing the actual elaboration of the act of violence. There are no reasons to make Marina’s action visible to the audience. When the scene cuts back to the close-up of Marina in the hospital room, she continues talking to Manfred, saying “dovrebbero portarmelo via,” and acknowledges that she cannot be the perfect iconographic mother. She struggles with her sentiments, but doesn’t fear the possibility that Manfred might report her behavior.

Once Marina confesses to Manfred the truth about the night of the accident, he first provokes her by saying “ti vuoi liberare di lui,” but then he seems to free himself from anger and transpose Marina into the figure of his own mother. “Non mi lasciare,” he says. Through Marina, he recovers his own mother and conceives a symbiosis between the two women. He then corrects himself and says “Marco, non lo lasciare.” Marina hugs Manfred and the two of them kiss unexpectedly. This time, the protagonists share the same space in a close-up that breaks away from the previous shot/reverse shot pattern scenes; the hostility is replaced by a more harmonious connection. It is clear that Marina’s attachment to Manfred is triggered by her confession.

The director closes the long flashback by offering a bird’s eye view of the two characters, lying on the hospital bed and embracing each other. While the unusual angle reflects their closeness, the shot also conveys a sense of tension and vulnerability: the spectator powerfully hovers above them, envisioning fatalistic consequences. The contrast between Marina’s black dress and the white sheets also suggests a sense of conflict, reinforced by the subsequent superimposition of the image of the street and the mountains that take Marina back to Manfred many years later.²¹

The very last part of the film develops the strong passion between the two characters. As Comencini stated in her interview with Laviosa (2009), she is interested in representing the nuances of relationships: love and hate, and how the two intermingle with each other. The last part of Quando la notte offers a space to investigate the complexity of these feelings, and explore Marina’s impulses, by capturing her desire to meet, once again, the only man that knows the truth about the night of the accident. Though this last part of the film shows Marina’s power to finally assert her subjectivity and balance her life as a mother and as a woman, the spectator is left with shots that retain a sense of fragility, and the potential empowering nature of their solidarity remains temporary.

As previously stated, the contrast of black and white in the bird’s eye view of the two characters, lying on the hospital bed, and the superimposition used to return to the present, convey a sense of tension and vulnerability. This tension is partially released once the two characters meet again, and the camera offers a similar top shot. This time, the contrast is between the green sheets of a hotel room and their naked bodies. Marina’s need to find sexual satisfaction with Manfred becomes a form of compensation for a life of secrecy, a way to fulfill a longing that has remained in the realm of the unspeakable for too long. In the contradiction between sexuality and repressing motherhood, sexuality is chosen as a way to contrast women’s silence and marginality.

In the foreword to Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy, Laura Mulvey (1988) raises questions that concern love and female pleasure. In the book, Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (1988: 12–13) add that “[t]he position of Italian feminism affirms, and opens a space for, female pleasure. It acknowledges its problematic nature, rather than denying it as simply imposed upon women by male-dominated discourse.” Female pleasure, the critics continue:

is acknowledged a space in the process of representation … a complex site … of (re)appropriation, but also subversion of male-constructed discourse and gaze … The acknowledgement of female pleasure engages in a line of enquiry upon the complexity of the relationship between politics and theory, dominant and oppressed, male and female, active and passive, seeing and being seen, representing and being represented. (Bruno and Nadotti, 1988: 13)

In Quando la notte, female pleasure appears in relation to the male and female binary, which is also, alternatively, active and passive. Near the end of the film, Marina is the character that goes back to find Manfred. She is the one depicted as the actively desiring subject who initiates the search and reaches out to fulfill a need that she has hidden for more than a decade.

The sexual intercourse is shot from different angles that are worth analyzing. First the camera offers a bird’s eye view of Marina. It is a medium shot of her body, from the waist up, naked with outstretched arms, in a crucified position. Marina’s body is not “displayed as a sexual object” (Mulvey, 1999: 837). While both her position and the camera angle make the woman seem vulnerable, as Rachel Anderson states, images of crucified women are extremely powerful and combine the image of the Christ and the image of the tempting female body: “the latent erotic content within the images of crucified women … is partly responsible for their power and the perseverance of the motif” (Anderson, 2007: 3). Marina can be perceived as a signifier of eroticism, and her sexual desire, then, can be interpreted as the embodiment of a powerful female statement. The shot becomes even more powerful when compared to the previous scene in which we see Manfred crying about all his repressed emotions: a melodramatic moment that expresses a melancholic sense of loss and a break away from his previous misogyny.

There is, though, a sense of piety attached to the image of the crucified woman. Though there is no suffering, the spectator knows about the physical and emotional pain that Marina’s maternal obligations have brought on her. In the following shot, also, Manfred does not become the viewed object of desire. Rather, the camera lingers on him on top of Marina, who embraces him in a maternal gesture. Later, moreover, the camera shows Marina lying on her stomach, passive and silent, almost subjugated. There are only two shots in which neither lover is subject or object: the characters lie down next to each other in a moment of closeness; they appear as equals, without dominance and subjugation.

Since the very beginning of the film, the protagonists have been introduced by images that reflect their fragmented self: the camera follows Marina’s arrival at the apartment and zooms in on a mirror that shows her reflection; the scene then cuts to Manfred in the act of removing his contact lenses in front of the bathroom mirror.²² The ending scene of Quando la notte reinforces the idea that the encounter between the two protagonists will neither change their life nor resolve their fragmentation. When the film closes, in fact, the camera offers a zooming out shot of two cable cars moving in opposite directions: they get close to each other, they superimpose, and then each goes its own way; one will reach the top of the mountain, the other the bottom of the valley. The image becomes a metaphor for Marina’s and Manfred’s lives, a visual metaphor for the solitude and complicity of two solitary human beings who casually meet, touch each other’s lives, and continue lonely on their own paths.

Comencini shapes the relationship between the two main characters as enigmatic and yet salvific. The female protagonist searches for the affirmation of her own identity as a woman who wants to break away from the image of the “mater dolorosa” (Günsberg, 2005: 28).²³ Nevertheless, Quando la notte ends on a pessimistic note. The last scenes of the film evoke an overall inescapable sense of solitude, and inevitably recall Marina’s isolation in her struggle to perform her maternal role. However, in a way, they are also provocative and push the audience to reflect on the fragility of human beings, and their difficulty in communicating emotions.

Unraveling female genealogy in Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te

In Tutto parla di te, Marazzi explores the question of postpartum depression by juxtaposing the stories of two women, Emma and Pauline, but also by entangling the story of Pauline with the accounts of other women who appear in video-recorded interviews. Emma is a young woman, a ballerina, and a single mother who is experiencing postpartum depression. Pauline is an elderly woman who, after many years of absence, returns to Turin, the city where she was born, to conduct research. She is an ethologist, but in Turin her interest shifts from animals to women suffering from postpartum depression. But Pauline is not simply a woman who conducts research: when she was seven, her own mother killed her second child and committed suicide as a result of postpartum depression.

As soon as Pauline enters the gate of her old house, she is haunted by the memories of her mother; her new job and her encounter with Emma prompt Pauline’s need to face up to her past as a daughter and to recover the lost figure of the mother. At the same time, Pauline helps Emma overcome her anxiety and depression, and find her own identity, as a mother and as a woman.

The plot is not as plain as this synopsis might suggest. Marazzi engages the viewer by gradually revealing a correspondence among all the women that appear on the screen. A first time viewer is not given to know Pauline’s story at the beginning. In fact, a mystery is built around her past, and we are left wondering, at least for a good part of the film, whether Pauline has actually experienced the loss of a child. We know something about her past is troubling her, but it is only near the end that Pauline reveals the story of her mother. Only then does it become clear that she is the abandoned daughter.

Marazzi’s film requires that the viewer be actively involved in a dynamic interplay with the narrative logic and chronology of the film. She frames it within two almost identical sequences: it begins with shots of Pauline on a train; near the end of the film Pauline again rides a train, after searching for Emma outside Turin, in a lake house where the young protagonist has taken shelter. At the beginning of the film, the viewer wrongly assumes that Pauline is arriving in Turin for the first time after many years. But this initial scene is a flash-forward and a moment of reconstruction employed to foreshadow the interconnectedness between the two characters.²⁴ Indeed, the train is the exact same one: it runs in the same direction, the same lights appear in the distance from the windowpane, and, more importantly, Pauline is wearing the same clothes. The only element that changes is the music: while the film opens to extra-diegetic sound that seems to reproduce the clicking noise of a train, while jazz double bass music is introduced to complement the mechanical noise, the sounds in the second scene on the train are diegetic and the source is the train itself, with the noise of its engine and wheels, and its whooshing sounds. The extra-diegetic sounds generate a haunting effect, but their artificiality is replaced by realistic sounds, which reflect Pauline’s ability to see the truth of her past.

The darkness that surrounds the contour of Pauline’s face when she first appears, in a medium close-up shot, sitting next to the train window, is suggestive of the shadows and the mystery in which she is living. In the first minutes of the film, Marazzi offers two very different close-ups of Pauline, which each acquires a different meaning in the story. When the protagonist is inside the train, the image of her face intercuts with photographs in double exposure of parts of the body of a young woman: we see her arm, hand, face, and waist. The viewer briefly enters Pauline’s life, and the stills become a metaphor for the fragmented relationship between Pauline and her own mother. The close-up of Pauline’s face from a different time and setting, when she is not on the train, creates a second connection to the story of Pauline’s mother, but also a correlation between Pauline and Emma. The close-up, in this case, interplays with the introduction of a voice-over—the voice comes from a tape player that Pauline finds in the closet of her own house²⁵—and intercuts that briefly show images of a lake, of Emma, and new photographs of the arm, waist, and face of a woman wearing a pink dress with white embroidery.

When we first hear the voice-over, Pauline’s mother is having a conversation with a doctor. When she is asked to describe what she sees, the woman responds by saying: “Niente, non vedo niente. Tanto nessuno mi crede, non ho mai detto bugie.” The words are played over images of Emma on the lake, and reflect Emma’s condition at the beginning of the story: she can’t see anything, because she has lost herself.²⁶ The initial dialogue can also be interpreted as an imaginary conversation between Pauline and Emma. Indeed, Pauline will be Emma’s “doctor,” the female counterpart that will help Emma resolve her anxiety toward her maternity.

In the casa di quartiere, the place where pregnant women and new mothers can socialize and find help, Pauline acts as a silent spectator: she observes women’s meetings and activities, but never speaks. She listens to interviews, views photographs. Her own story surfaces through the camera shots that alternately zoom into the TV screen and then switch to a close-up of Pauline’s face. Thus, the camera allows the viewer and Pauline to enter the space of the women who are talking on television, but also intensifies the connection between those women and Pauline. The protagonist also observes some photos of mothers with their children.²⁷ The viewer can feel that something is moving her and affecting her. The camera zooms into the pictures of women smiling, but we are left wondering (and Pauline is probably doing the same): how happy are they?

The problems that the protagonist hears and witnesses originate a sort of awakening in her. Pauline understands the fragility, anxiety, and sadness that some women can feel once they become mothers. When Pauline finds the tape and listens to her mother’s voice, the connection between the women and the protagonist becomes deeper: the women who are interviewed must share something with her life. “Nessuno mi ha aiutata,” says Pauline’s mother, who was left alone. This scene is followed by real footage of an interview with Mary Patrizio, an Italian woman who killed her five-month old baby: the camera zooms into the TV screen and Mary says, “ero sola, vuota, sola, avevo un muro davanti.” The intercuts between Pauline and Mary reinforce the correlation between the two women.

The words of the tape keep playing, and Pauline’s mother’s voice asks, “Che mi serve capire il passato?” This question is directed at Pauline because her own past holds clues to better understand her mother’s behavior. The tape, just as Laura Marks notes in her analysis of Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, contains the “trace” of her mother’s voice that will “gradually activate the sense of her mother’s presence” (Marks, 2000: 112), and Pauline needs to “restore the history that has become fossilized” (Marks, 2000: 113) in the tape.

It is not by chance that the director employs Goliarda Sapienza’s (2008) text L’arte della gioia as another fictional element to stage the importance of the past. When in the film the two protagonists casually enter the same cafe, Pauline places Sapienza’s novel on her table. While Emma voices her frustration at not being able to read now that she is a mother, Pauline remains silent, but her hand touches the cover of the book. This contact generates a meaningful connection between herself and Modesta, the transgressive protagonist of Sapienza’s novel. Considering that Emma is the character that embodies Modesta’s intolerance toward bourgeois masks, the viewer is invited to consider that a correspondence might also exist between Pauline and Modesta. Indeed, Pauline’s detachment from her past recalls Modesta’s initial desire to forget her painful, violent, and solitary early life with her mother and sister; but like Modesta, Pauline cannot escape her past, and her understanding of it becomes crucial for her present and future.²⁸

Moreover, as Sapienza “creates a character who subverts the common idea of both marriage and motherhood” (Di Rollo, 2016: 35) by inventing a character like Modesta who challenges the established gender hierarchies, and theorizes a “maternal-filial relationship, based on a voluntary bond, rather than on a biological one” (Di Rollo, 2016: 37), Marazzi builds a female genealogy that interweaves the surrogate mother-daughter relationships with the biological one.²⁹

While Pauline’s life starts reshaping itself in light of her witnessing women’s sufferings, Marazzi offers a parallel between Pauline’s mother and Emma. Not only do we see archival footage of a woman with her child on a lake, followed by shots of Emma on the lake with her son; we also start perceiving how Pauline is seeing Emma as a counterpart to her own mother, when the director carefully alternates the use of Pauline’s voice-over with Pauline’s mother’s voice played on the tape.

The film does not feature much dialogue. The two main characters move, walk, and observe; even when they meet, we hear Emma’s brief monologues but Pauline is always quiet—she offers Emma a cigarette, she gives her a handkerchief to cover her hair, but she doesn’t say many words. Until the very end, Pauline helps through her gestures. What she offers is her presence, but her contact eventually “fosters … more sophisticated verbal communication” (Muraro, 1996: 7). This “translation in context” (Muraro, 1996: 7), though, is not easy to achieve, especially after one of their encounters ends abruptly with a strong confrontational moment in which Emma tells Pauline that her son bears some responsibility for her depression: “È anche colpa sua se io sono ridotta così,” she asserts, and Pauline is finally able to give voice to herself by condemning Emma’s words. Pauline suffered from her mother’s inability to recognize her daughter’s needs, and feels the need to speak up to defend herself and Emma’s son.

As much as Emma feels inadequate in her maternal role, she does not hurt or abandon her child. The protagonist is once tempted to leave her son in the street, a dramatic scene which Marazzi renders by employing cutaways and sound effects. Amid the noise of car and pedestrian traffic and the crying of the baby, the viewer sees a long wide shot of Emma walking and stopping in front of a shop window, followed by a medium shot of her walking toward the camera, and a wide shot of her crossing the street without the carriage. Once the viewer realizes that she has left her child behind on the sidewalk, the noise of the traffic stops, and only the crying of the baby is audible. The scene cuts to Pauline who is trying to call Emma on the phone: Emma does not answer, but when the camera cuts back to her, the viewer sees her returning to the carriage after hearing the ringing. It is not clear whether Emma knows who is calling her, or whether she hears the phone at all, but the director chooses Pauline to remotely resolve this powerful moment of rejection.

The resolution to the story is offered through images that constantly shift—intercuts, close-ups, oneiric moments—a technique that seems to parallel the multilayered aspects of maternity. This also creates a final strong dynamic tension, before the characters come to terms with their own reality and overcome their solitude, and reaches its peak with the employment of photos by renowned contemporary photographer and documentarist Simona Ghizzoni—pictures of women whose heads are hidden behind a curtain or shadowed inside the frame of a door.

Among the many scenes that characterize the complex montage built to resolve the conflict is the image of Emma changing her clothes in front of a mirror: first she is wearing the pink embroidery dress that Pauline’s mother was wearing in the photographs presented to the viewer at the beginning of the film; then Emma changes into a new green dress. Fabric becomes a system of non-linguistic signs, an iconic structure that, in this particular case, remains visual, whilst acquiring new meaning. In Pauline’s imagination, Emma is like her mother while wearing the pink dress. But in her case, the photograph can be transformed: once she is able to remove from Emma’s body the old fabric that embodies the “physical presence” (Marks, 2000: 112) of her mother, Emma can become a new woman. Indeed, with this symbolic gesture, Pauline gives Emma her own new identity: Emma is not her mother, but she will become the mother that Pauline did not have.

Through Pauline’s voice-over narration and through her letter that finally exposes her own past, Marazzi creates a bridge between present and past, between Pauline and Emma, and leads us in and out of different scenes, by alternating black and white footage, shots of Pauline writing the letter, shots of Emma on the lake, and a shot of Pauline and Emma standing next to each other. Even though the words seem to be a continuation of the letter, Pauline’s voice finally becomes diegetic when she reveals her mother’s infanticide, depression, and death:

Una mattina mentre io ero a scuola e il mio fratellino dormiva ancora c’è stato un incendio e la casa si è riempita di fumo. Le finestre stranamente erano tutte chiuse, le aveva chiuse lei. Di mio fratello non si è mai più parlato. Mia madre si è lasciata morire in ospedale senza ricordare la sua vita passata e quello che aveva fatto.

Pauline’s letter has a positive effect on Emma. In one of the last scenes, Emma declares that she has found who she really is: “io sono io” she says, while the camera slows down and lingers on her face. She says that she has finally been able to separate herself from the baby, and see him for the first time. Pauline also reminds Emma that she could not have hurt her son, because she had not been left alone like her mother was. Pauline’s last words, in a dialogue that breaks away from the voice-over narration and resolves the sense of fragmentation, reiterates the need to understand the multiple facets of maternity and the importance of the care and support that must come from outside.

Marazzi finds this help through female solidarity, by unraveling a thread that starts from herself and her personal experience and moves to the stories of other women. Pauline’s mother’s story, Emma’s story, as well as the stories of the women interviewed in the film, all resemble Marazzi’s mother’s story. And the director’s intention is to continue searching for and understanding her own mother, in order to give her back the dignity she lost. In her desire to redeem the figure of the mother, Marazzi seems to embrace Luisa Muraro’s stance on the female symbolic order. Inspired by the thoughts of Melanie Klein, Muraro not only invites us to the recognition of maternal authority, but also stresses the importance of female genealogy, by inviting women to find a potential symbolic mother through the relationship of entrustment. This entrustment among women creates a social tie able to provide support and points of reference. The ties to other women also offer a restitution of the maternal figure: “possono restituircela nel presente, ce la rappresentano, nel pieno significato del ri-presentare” (Muraro, 1991: 34).

Alina Marazzi searches for the mother and, through the bond and parallel stories of Emma and Pauline and the connections with other women who, just like Liseli, feel inadequate in their maternal role, is able to restituire a new image of her own mother’s life; also, Pauline’s figure and the words that filter through her final letter call for something very similar to that philosophical entrustment theorized by Luisa Muraro. A viewer who is familiar with Marazzi’s documentaries immediately recognizes that the voice that plays on Pauline’s tape recorder is the director’s own voice. Marazzi employs the same technique she used in Un’ora sola ti vorrei when she read the correspondence between Liseli (her mother) and her friend Sonia, and also the letter that she (Alina) invented for herself on behalf of her mother. Through all her characters, therefore, not only does Marazzi offer a reflection on the notion of maternity and solitude, on the importance of female relationship and solidarity, but is also able to reconstruct and voice her mother’s story.

Soon after her arrival in Turin, Pauline finds her old dollhouse. The director first cuts to black and white footage of a girl playing with a dollhouse, then cuts to stop-motion animation of a family: we see a woman, a man, a girl, and a little baby. The family seems happy, but when the mother is left alone with a crying baby, she closes the window, just like Pauline’s mother did before killing her son. The film ends with the same stop-motion animation, but this time the family is happy, the voice of the director tells the audience that the mother is ready to start living again. Emma is the new woman in the dollhouse, the woman ready to start her new life, as a mother and as a woman. The director’s decision to end the film with a frame-by-frame manipulation that conveys the illusion of movement where in fact there is stillness is the final effort to engage the viewer in a concern with how we view reality, especially when it comes to the issue of postpartum depression, its inaccurate misrepresentations and superficial interpretations.

Conclusions

In Quando la notte and Tutto parla di te, Cristina Comencini and Alina Marazzi reveal the fracture between the expectations of society and the needs and feelings of the individual. Both films delve into some of the facets of motherhood and tell the stories of women who struggle to find a balance between their maternal duties and the recognition of their identity, between the love for the child and the love for the self. Both films also seem to convey a sense of fortuity and indifference, and respond to the desire to reconcile past and present. Indeed, the relations between the characters are prompted by occasional encounters: Marina and Manfred, as well as Pauline and Emma, are strangers to each other, and yet, they save each other’s lives; their solitude is not resolved through the solidarity of a family member or a friend, but the help of someone they did not know. In other words, De Gregorio’s “monsters” remain invisible, and the fragility of an unknown person becomes salvific. In both films, moreover, the past emerges as a fracture in the present life of the characters, but is ultimately used to find a positive resolution. Pauline is the abandoned daughter of a mother who committed infanticide and died in a psychiatric institution; Manfred is the abandoned son of a mother who eloped to America.

The past haunts the two characters, and influences their behavior, but the past is also reshaped in light of a new awareness. Pauline’s flashbacks and oneiric visions develop in the symbolic transposition of Pauline’s mother’s dress onto Emma’s body, but also culminate with the visualization of Emma wearing a new dress and with the final acquisition of her own new identity as a woman and as a mother, even before the letter is written. In Quando la notte, the past plays a double role that affects both characters. Manfred finds a negative resemblance between Marina and his own mother, but after his accident is able to see a good mother in Marina, and his desire for maternal love emerges when he tells her not to abandon him. Marina, then, understands how crucial her maternal role is by learning about Manfred’s mother’s departure. Comencini employs a photograph of Manfred sitting with his father and two brothers outside the lodge to stress the connection between the two mothers and intensify Marina’s haunting thoughts and dreams. First, the camera offers a shot of Marina’s face occupying the space of the mother missing from the photo of the family. Later, the same photograph turns into an oneiric vision when Marina dreams of it coming alive: the viewer sees Manfred running inside the house and hears the voice-over of the mother calling his name, but when the boy enters the house, he only finds a snack and there is no trace of the mother. The emptiness left by Manfred’s mother echoes in Marina and guides her present.

Both directors allow their characters to ultimately embrace their maternal role. In her text Regretting Motherhood, sociologist Orna Donath (2017) draws on feminist psychoanalyst Anat Palgi-Hecker (2005), and states that the recognition of maternal ambivalence can help women reach a “maternal developmental milestone”³⁰ (Donath, 2017: 44); the two films seem to align to this line of thought, with the two main young female characters slowly understanding and adapting to their maternal role. While the subjective experience of the characters’ approach to motherhood develops, however, a viewer cannot avoid thinking about the implications that maternity embodies within a patriarchal culture that tends to reduce women to the maternal function, and dictates the appropriate ways in which a mother should behave and love her child, a culture in which the mother “is portrayed as naturally self-sacrificing, endlessly patient, and devoted to the care of others in ways that almost demand that she forgets she has her own personality and needs” (Donath, 2017: 32). Quando la notte and Tutto parla di te allow their viewers to reflect on the needs of the individual, on the feelings and the experience of the woman as a human being, by challenging rules and expectations of a society that too easily labels mothers as “good” or “bad.” Marazzi’s film, which strictly focuses on female characters intertwined in a combination of personal, public, and mediatic spaces, arguably offers the more feminist and empowering approach when compared to Comencini’s film—which is more traditional, with the employment of a male character who helps reshape the woman’s life. However, both films successfully provoke the audience and broaden the discussion on maternity and identity within the history of Italian cinema.

Footnotes

Notes

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