Mario Martone in Cannes and “Fuori” for the honors

Fuori is a portrait of Goliarda Sapienza. It must be said that portraying such a multifaceted and complex figure should avoid the notion of a biopic at all costs. Because the story of the writer celebrated in the novel The Art of Joy (Portuguese edition of Dom Quixote) is long, starting from her Sicilian birthplace, involving fascism, anarchism and trade unions, theatre and cinema (she was an actress and the wife of a filmmaker), thefts, petty crimes, convictions and sentences served, drug addiction and petty terrorism. Mario Martone has no intention of circumscribing this entire story. Let's just say he asks to borrow a slice of the cake, an intense segment.

In Fuori , Sapienza is played by Valeria Golino. It's Rome in 1980, and she's just been released from prison for stealing jewelry from someone she knows. She comes into contact with Roberta (Matilda De Angelis, phenomenal), a volcano of life inspired by women Sapienza has actually met, encounters that come from two of her other works, L'università di Rebibbia and Le certezze del dubbio .

In a galloping bastardization of this profession, certain “critics” in Cannes with editorial responsibilities in important Anglo-Saxon magazines write that Roberta is Goliarda’s young friend, that they are former cellmates, and so on, without understanding that Goliarda and Roberta are, simply, author and character on the same screen, reality and fantasy, and that what is literary, above all, is the extremely complex relationship of affective dependence between them – a relationship of creator-creature.

[the trailer for “Fuori”:]

Roberta is a whirlwind of desires in her twenties, an emotional mirror, a silhouette of Sapienza's youth. Here comes friendship. Love. Erotic attraction. But also a mother-daughter, incestuous dimension. The feelings heightened between Goliarda, now a mature woman, and Roberta, a young rebel and junkie, are passionate, erotic, and necessarily confusing.

And if Sapienza's autobiography in The Art of Joy is a “living organism”, imaginary, that regenerates itself, if his writing – as Mario Martone told us this afternoon in an interview – is a “magmatic writing”, the film also follows this path, fragmentary, non-linear.

In the past, Martone summons other things: a Pasolinian atmosphere that suits the character portrayed in the film, the women (Sapienza is in her own way a Mamma Roma), the prisons, and an outlaw attitude. In prison, with her friends, Sapienza rejuvenates. The “fuori” in the title comes from here: just as those women manage to feel free in prison, the society around them can also become a prison outside.

Martone and his regular co-writer of recent years, his lifelong companion Ippolita di Majo, brought to Cannes a work that abandons itself to the literature of Goliarda Sapienza and places itself at that level. It is rare for this to happen with a film. But it happens in this one. For the Neapolitan filmmaker and stage director, Fuori also traces a circle, rediscovering his best, the impetus of his first works from the 1990s, Morte di un matematico napoletano and L'amore molesto (co-written with Laura Ferrante).