Liberation. The film adaptation by the director of his own work is always a special case in the practice of world cinema, when potential risk groups are filled not only, and not so much with ambitious ambitions for professional growth, but with a private desire to be at least understandable for a sophisticated audience. Italian director and screenwriter Cristina Comencini, who in the past decade presented the film with the mysterious title “The Beast in the Heart”, did not hide the fact that she formatted it with an eye on major international festivals, including the Oscars, for which he was subsequently nominated. The reaction of European critics was more restrained, which, however, did not prevent them from awarding the lead singer with a special Volpi Cup.
Co-authored with her daughter Julia and screenwriter Francesca Marciano Comencini presents an initially holistic story about the human, in the center of which is the complex inner world of a pregnant young woman named Sabine (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), who is engaged in the voiceover of films and lives with her husband-actor somewhere on the periphery of the country. Trivial for its time, the story of an Italian who survived a deep childhood psychotrauma and once faced face to face with her own fear, in the interpretation of Comenchini acquires an unexpected versatility and contrast. It considers the probable crisis not only through the prism of the relationship of the pathology of man with the world around him, but also through the world itself, from the depths of which obvious arguments are constantly drawn, dispassionately proving that running around in a circle is worse than any more or less meaningful action. While the heroine is immobile and amorphous in her strategy of existence, everything around her seems gray and sad: older sister Emilia, who lost her sight, spends her days in proud loneliness, diluted by a dubious company of sexual deviations on the topic of same-sex love, and relations with her husband are inexorably close to a dead end.
The moral skew of society, visible to the naked eye in the film, cannot be compared with American films in the spirit of Larry Clark and others. In "The Beast" there is not even a hint of the obsessive desire to observe a certain "justice" characteristic of other filmmakers as a possible means of counterbalancing the antimorality pouring from the screen on the audience or hidden attacks towards domestic violence in any of its manifestations. Even the theme of incest, to which the aforementioned Clark openly resorted, is formed and remains in the darkest part of the picture, reminiscent of itself only with retrospective ghostly visions. Sabina’s attempts to recognize herself and to separate, in the language of psychoanalysis, her past self from the present self sometimes seem clumsy-symbolic, but pay off with a high level of internal drama and almost confessional motives.
About the characteristic Italian cinema tradition of deliberate entanglement of the plot in the film Comenchini recall, except that some inserts in the form of “foreign” heroes, knocking out of the melancholic and meditative aura of “The Beast” – charismatic woman Maria, awakening to life Emilia, albeit not quite in the usual way or hapless director of soap operas Andrea, unexpectedly trying on the role of a friend-psychologist. To say that Comenchini’s film is about only one person’s problems is not entirely true. I bet the director was more outspoken and uncomfortable in her book, and the film still leaves the audience with some hope of recovery. And not just heroines, but everyone else, in different or equal degrees.