Margherita Vicario he made his directorial debut with Gloria! in competition in Berlin 74. The film, defined by the director as a “musical film”, is the result of the fusion of her two souls, given that Vicario is an actress graduated from the academy and a singer-songwriter. The film explores the women’s desire to be listened to through a story set in the early 19th century, when women were taught music but were not allowed to perform it in public.
The plot develops over the Venetian “hospitals”., like that of Sant’Ignazio, a mixture of orphanage, conservatory and convent, where girls without families learned to play. The protagonist is Teresa, played by Galatéa Bellugi, a poor self-taught “mute” forced to be a scullery maid. She together with four friends (there is also one of the performers Veronica Lucchesi, voice of the group La representative di list), overcome jealousy and class differences to let their musical qualities shine. The story challenges the musician priest Perlina, played by Paolo Rossi, and the girls they even play for Pope Pius VII visiting the institute.
The director stated that the goal was to “place a fictional story in a precise historical context to tell the real condition of these musicians in their erathose flowers left to dry (by social rules and the Napoleonic edicts that closed those institutions) and which remained hidden in the pages of History”.
To do this the Vicario takes some libertiesas in the choice of almost jazz music that Teresa improvises on the piano (it’s hard to think that Johann Stein had built a grand piano like the one seen in the film), helping to make the spectators’ imagination fly without being bound to historical accuracy. Despite the nineteenth-century setting, the five girls embody the same freedom sought by the director’s generation today. A film therefore that often deliberately forgets and challenges some traditional cinematographic rules considered to be strict, but which is certainly something to be experienced.