All prisoners, in the dystopian family of Laura Bispuri: of conventions, obsessions, memories, contradictions and controra, malaise and illness, the desire to start over and disenchantment. The peacock in the title is a symbol of freedom: it represents the desire to fly, to break the mold, to violate virtuous conduct and (perhaps) to overcome the evil of living. The unreachable paradise: everyone pretends to be happy, at least in passing, that they can survive, even if bruises and bruises restrict movement.
We are in Ardea, on the Lazio coast. Different generations oppose each other within the domestic walls of a holiday home with a balcony overlooking the sea. Under a pale sun, 70-year-old Nena (Dominique Sanda) reunites her family to celebrate her birthday. In fact, she just wants to settle the accounts with the past. With her are her patient husband Umberto (Carlo Cerciello), her children Vito (Leonardo Lidi) and Caterina (Maya Sansa)Adelina (Alba Rohrwacher), Vito’s partner struggling with a violent personal crisis, his cousin Isabella (Yle Vianello), the angelic nephew Alma (Carolina Michelangeli), the ex-partner of Caterina, Manfredi (Fabrizio Ferracane), who brings with him the Slavic Joana (Tihana Lazovic), the maid Lucia (Maddalena Crippa), closed in a pathological silence, with her daughter Grazia (Ludovica Alvazzi Del Frate). Paco, the peacock in the forum an expression of harmony. On the wall there is a drawing of a dove: it looks like an omen.
All present exhibit pain and discontent. The conversation becomes a flow of self-awareness that intoxicates the party, transforming it into a game of slaughter. Nena has a torn stocking and memory lapses, a reflection of an existential dystonia: a cumbersome past oppresses her. Vito on the bill and suffering from Adelina’s recurrent depressions. Catherine withered, she has lost passion and interest in things. Manfredi indulges in sexual fantasies. Everyone fights with feelings of guilt, sins, failures, resentments. Everything is blurry, out of position. But the book of regrets only truly opens when the peacock falls off the balcony because with that marvelous feathered decoration he cannot take flight.
To the third film as a director later Sworn Virgin (2015) e My daughter (2018), all starring Alba Rohrwacher, Laura Bispuri, born in 1977, shows a growing expressive maturity. There is an explosion of feelings in Nena’s small apartment which recalls certain cuts in the image of Scola, Antonioni and even Fellini in the description of the group. The natural light of the interiors, the sad sound of the cello, the wheel of Paco that widens in the living room, the silence of the guests, the lunch in the oven. The bonds yield to a collective disturbance in the nervous comings and goings and the regrets multiply. The anti-bourgeois criticism is played on gestures and looks, bouncing from one room to another like a distorted echo: perhaps not all is lost, but too much time has been wasted living in secret. In the cast emerge the exotic melancholies of Dominique Sanda and the measure of Maya Sansa. The rest is a good orchestral performance, with a prevalence of women.
THE PARADISE OF THE PEACOCK at Laura Bispuri
(Italy, 2021, duration 89 ‘)
with Dominique Sanda, Alba Rohrwacher, Maya Sansa, Fabrizio Ferracane, Leonardo Lidi, Maddalena Crippa
Rating: *** out of 5
In the halls
June 18, 2022 | 08:47
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