‘Fuori’ Review: Valeria Golino Exudes Humanity In Mario Martone’s Refreshing Biopic Of A Struggling Literary Pioneer – Cannes Film Festival
Literary biopics are hard to pull off, and even harder to market (1995’s Total Eclipse missed a trick with “Leonardo DiCaprio IS Arthur Rimbaud!”). Even well-known U.S. writers tend to be the domain of the indie world, resulting in films as respectable but hardly lucrative as Capote (2005), Kill Your Darlings (2013) and Shirley (2020). The odds are, then, that a movie dedicated to a brief period in the life of Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) — a noted Italian feminist and political activist denied her due until two years after her death — isn’t likely to cause a splash in international markets. However, Mario Martone’s thoughtful film does work quite well as a character study, in the same way that Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? captured the struggles of a failing writer with big ideas.
Sapienza is played by Valeria Golino, who recently directed a six-part adaptation of the author’s posthumous hit bestseller The Art of Joy, a novel Sapienza finished in 1976 and which remained unpublished until 1998. When we meet her, the year is 1980 and her manuscript has been rejected by every major publisher in town. Things are bad, so much so that she has been reduced to stealing, and the theft of some expensive jewelry from a wealthy socialite sees her spending some quality time in prison. Her motives for that, however, remain murky; although Sapienza is clearly in need of money, there is also a mischievous side to her beliefs that suggest an unapologetically radical-left dimension to the crime (the title card says that she was capable of cultivating “love and furore” equally).
Although her induction into prison is a humiliating, dehumanizing experience (“Are you wearing a wig?” asks a warden, tugging her hair and demanding she strip), Sapienza doesn’t seem overly traumatized, holding her own within the hierarchies that exist behind bars and even getting her hands dirty in a fist fight. She becomes friends with one young girl in particular — Roberta (Matila De Angelis) — a seemingly hardened career criminal who becomes a big part of Sapienza’s life, a tight friendship that, over time, will become more of a fractious, mother-daughter surrogacy.
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The title of the film translates into English as Out, and although the film shows Sapienza on both sides of the bars, the overriding theme of the film is freedom. Sapienza becomes fascinated by the women of Rome’s Rebibbia prison, in particular the remarkable way that Roberta, in particular, seems to swim through life from one reality to another. The prison scenes are the most interesting, and Martone builds up a very textured analysis of the types of women doing time, and the types of crime that send them there. Drugs are a given, and Roberta has built up a pretty serious junk habit, but, this being Italy, the radical left is at its height, and many women have connections to the Brigate Rosse, one of the many outlaw European outfits of the time carrying out robberies, kidnappings and sabotage.
Golino exudes humanity and patience, but there’s an edge to her relationships that does border on the exploitative, which, inevitably, makes for tension with Roberta. But the overriding sense is not that Sapienza is fetishizing these women in the way the French bourgeoisie once went nuts for Jean Genet; it’s more that she finds their stamina, their drive, their autonomy inspiring.
The ending, then, is a little disappointing, since it involves a little twist that, if she really was paying so much close attention, Sapienza would have seen coming. Nevertheless, the film’s central premise is refreshing; most literary biopics are about how a writer’s most famous work came into being (Naked Lunch and Howl spring immediately to mind). Fuori, though, is about the opposite, concerning a woman who’s already done that, now looking to make peace with her disappointments and learning to live freely in her own skin.
Title: Fuori
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director: Mario Martone
Screenwriters: Ippolita Di Majo, Mario Martone
Cast: Valeria Golino, Matilda De Angelis, Elodie, Corrado Fortuna
Sales agent: Goodfellas
Running time: 1 hr 55 mins
