2023-10-28 18:57:34
by Valerio Cappelli
as if he had won twice. Alba Rohrwacher receives the Monica Vitti award for best actress at the Rome Film Festival. From the stage of the Auditorium she said: This also seems like a game of mirrors, Monica who continues to talk to us. Thanks to this kind film, long live the power of kindness, which too often we all forget.
In My Hair Hurts by Roberta Torre, Alba’s name is Monica and she talks to Vitti, while she is losing her memory she identifies with her roles, she does not distinguish between what she dreams and what she lives, defenseless, as the real one was. Monica. That at the age of 60, at the height of her strength, her autobiography began like this: At a certain point in my life, without knowing it, I must have decided to forget. Not the pain or the mistakes, but forgetting facts, people, maybe just confusing everything. Alba, blonde like Vitti, dresses like her, talks to us in the mirror and talks to the actors she plays with, Sordi, Delon, Mastroianni… The title takes up a famous line from Antonioni’s The Red Desert, and there is something of him in this story .
I don’t play Monica Vitti – says Alba – I don’t believe in this type of cinema, there’s no need. There is this special idea of approaching a character without embodying it, but transcending it with respect, love, irony. She moved me away from me, I was like in a trance, there was also a mental discomfort that we had to represent. In the film I am a woman who gets lost and finds herself through an imaginary dialogue with Vitti. She is the actress who, with her apparent lightness, combined her laughter with her tears, brought the bourgeois woman to the screen. She has always nourished my education and my imagination, here she let me enter my unconscious, I carried her inside her dreams. It was an intimate exchange, on the edge of an illness that smells like laundry, and of memory which for an actress is a bulwark, a fear, a necessity. She tells you when she wore the Stardust dress. She was hanging on a mannequin in the room next to where she was trying on her costume: It’s made of many small buttons, each one was an access, as if Monica Vitti were telling me, here, you can wear Cinderella’s slipper. Dare, you can, with respect, kindness….
The director started with a reading about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols who told of his wife who had lost her memory and he was devoted to her until her passing. Roberta was guided by two questions: Can we borrow a memory to find ourselves? Forgetting necessary. It is also a film that talks about ghosts, evokes them, questions them, or more simply wants to spend time with them. Monica-Alba, careless, carefree, confused, inhabited by her candor in her imaginary theater indulged by a tender and courageous husband, Filippo Timi, lets this game become their life.
October 28, 2023 (modified October 28, 2023 | 6:57 pm)
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