The eternal return of the chief First of all, it is necessary to make a reservation and recall that the word “love” is a pure metaphor, which without description causes confusion and formalizes any hermeneutic enterprise, in fact, nullifying it. On the other hand, the biologizing decoding of “love” suffers from the same formalism and reductionism, which also sheds no light on the phenomenon. Both extreme poles - poetic and scientific metaphors - must be temporarily put out of brackets, not cut off, but ousted, leaving the possibility of feedback.
The phenomenon conventionally called “love” is categorically impossible to place in the cognitive space, otherwise it is absolutely impossible to reason about it, because of so much reasoning. Fortunately, this picture, despite the overt indication, is not limited to the topic of “love”, and perhaps not at all about it. Rather, it is one of the strongest passions, trapped in massive (but not necessarily conscious) manipulation by agents responsible for different levels of influence – personal, social, essential, ontological. In this perspective, some minor characters are pushed to the forefront, where the main role is played by the hero of Trentignan.
The doctor is a classic trickster who seized on the possibility of destroying the critically affected Giorgio from the very first acquaintance with him. In his intentions, the trickster dedicates everyone, including the viewer, with a rascal quote of his brother by essential nature - Demosthenes: "I am running from the battlefield so that I can have a heroic action in the next battles." In other words, he makes it clear to Giorgio that he will give him the opportunity to “heroically die” this time, and throughout the film very subtly, skillfully and without errors constructs the world of the dominants necessary to lead the hero to the abyss of the fall, and forces to play along with all the participants of the action who fell into the trap of his game. At the moment when the trickster is ready to kill the hero, he cynically, casually says: “You are beautiful and sensual, I do not envy those people who are endowed with this gift.”
However, the "conspiracy" is not so easy to uncover, and purely externally, a quite decent picture is formed, where Giorgio's sensuality is tested by the pressure of various moral attitudes developed by social experience and refracted in a specific historical environment. The test is carried out by doubting one’s own feelings and actions, which turns into an education of a “feeling of love”, because the leading, general philosophical doubt of the film is driven by the question of what is “love”.
The tide of high feelings and the paradise forgetting of the unsuspecting hero is destroyed by the aggressive persistence of the question of “love”, whose personification is certainly Fosca. And as it seems, the plot is guided by trivial opposition: Clara is external, which is equal to “inauthentic love”, Fosca is internal, which is equal to “true love”. But it only seems, in fact, it is much more complicated. In the orbit of the doctor get all the characters and extras, even those with whom he personally is not familiar, so Clara, playing along, dramatically changes his “love” mood and shows readiness to break the relationship for the sake of “test/education”, for the sake of the game, for the sake of Fosca.
Trickster, in his revealing games, as a rule, is limited to a set of those tools that lie at his fingertips, that is, made by participants in the mob of mortal life, naively involved in their human contradictions, located inside the ecumene. This set is easy to manipulate when it is enough to sow small discord, confuse, deceive, intrigue, push your foreheads to the amusement of boredom, but not enough for a clear all-consuming goal - the "destruction" of the high moral hero-antagonist. Here, the trickster turns to his main secret weapon, which is older than himself, older than any trickery, mythology and meaning - it is about where the crook himself came from - about the original impulse of nothingness.
Fosca is this impulse, for the reliable concealment of its all-manifesting energy, outwardly carefully disguised by unparalleled weakness, deadly soreness and repulsive ugliness. This is the primordial dark matter (the beginning of all things) sought by the ancient Greeks and questioned by the new Greeks, Husserl and Heidegger. It poses a threat to any attempt to stop, to any device, order, settlement, when you address it, any confidence, any conviction, any stability disappears, because it always forces you to start anew, always returns to the question of what is, for example, what is love.
Foska is a dangerous weapon, like the brahmastra of the Indian epic, which is activated by a high level of mental concentration available only to gods, saints or tricksters, and which is also designed to defend the principles of dharma - its own impulses of creation through the total destruction of the alluvial inertia of social tradition and human history as a whole (sansara). Here we come to the question of the motives of the trickster - and what good is he, in fact, in playing for the sake of the game, in destroying, why should he resort to such heavy weapons, from which, by the way, he is not immune? The fact is that the demonization and dehumanization of the trickster occurred in all archaeological appearance - later, at the stage of collective stratification and the formation of the first antagonisms. Before that, before the pantheons, the (conditionally) higher entities, personifications, and gods most likely had no ethical characteristics, either negative or positive. These entities did not even need to be propitiated, they did not require bloody sacrifices, oracles and a stratum of initiates, they were directly contacted by all members of the collective, and in this constant contact they solved emerging individual and collective problems.
Therefore, the trickster craves not so much perdition as a test of force, wants to lead the hero through a powerful stream of personal purification, and finding the fundamental (not dependent on socio-historical perturbations) foundations, answers in which he would be sure, and Fosca harshly, hysterically asks Giorgio - "what is love!". In this sense, the hero is really "destroyed" and in the most favorable case, should be reborn transformed and give an answer, and as the picture shows - he gives it, but the subsequent fate indicates that this was another delusion, self-deception, the hero did not exhaust his possibilities to the end and somewhere gave up and hastened to answer. Not this time. The impulse fades, the trickster continues to play with a coin that relied on the hero as a reward, provided it is transformed, and goes away with a laughing ugly dwarf.
It is interesting that such tricksters, Fosci, crumbling heroes, arise in the existence faults, in crises, transitional periods, as Italy in the era of wars for national independence, serving as the background of the unfolding drama in the film Scola. Feudal marriage rites, courtesy, adultery leave the arena, and at the moment of this departure, breaks are temporarily formed, from which a blinding darkness breaks out, forcing us to reconsider the main issues anew, once again, again. And admittedly, the director masterfully portrayed the breakdown, the tear and the devastation, leaving the picture open, echoing calling Fosca to account.