Director Susanna Nicchiarelli is back in competition on the Lido with a non-traditional biopic centered on the founder of the order of abbesses who collaborated with Francesco D’Assisi
Il Francesco by Liliana Cavani with Mickey Rourke and Helena Bonham Carter and the musical like Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar. The musical humanism of the Anonima Frotolosi ensemble and the Cosmo piece “Le cose più rare”. The miracle of Santa Scolastica and the song of songs. Susanna Nicchiareli is not afraid to dare. In Chiara, presented in competition at the Festival, the director mixes the most diverse worlds and atmospheres. So after Nico (Orizzonti Award for best film at the 74th Venice International Film Festival) and Miss Marx, in competition in 2019, the filmmaker brings a new chapter of her cinematography to the beach dedicated to strong but not too studied female figures , because they are overshadowed by the male characters they collaborated with. And the work adopts an even more experimental and daring style than the previous films. From the language spoken by the protagonists, to the musical glances, up to the sung sequences. In short, we are faced with a nonconformist film, likewise with the historical character who gives the film its title.
deepening
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Chiara is a work that is aimed at everyone, even non-believers. The biopic is not like those saints you usually keep in your wallet. The saint becomes an ante-litteram feminist, closer to an eighteen-year-old from the seventies than to a thirteenth-century nun. Nonetheless, the film made use of the advice of Chiara Frugoni, the famous medievalist who disappeared in April and to whom the film is dedicated.
“And as reported by Frugoni Chiara d’Assisi was the first woman to write an original rule for women, refusing to decline a pre-existing male rule to be feminine: an astonishing rule, full of sweetness, aimed at understanding rather than judging and punish (…) Contrary to what she would have liked, she was forced into seclusion, but her solitude was inhabited by many affections and a very strong spiritual tension.”
Between the loaves and the injera, the typical bread of many regions of Africa, between the Umbrian pinoccata with chicken with its innards, Chiara is a work in which food becomes a sort of viaticum for sharing a good with others and to break down differences. But the film is above all a joyous ode to sisterhood. The protagonist (played by Margherita Mazzucco La Lena from the TV series my brilliant friend) could not carry out any of her projects without the help of the other nuns, among which the characters played by Carlotta Natoli and Paola Tiziana Cruciani stand out. The male part of the cast instead sees Andrea Carpenzano (the star of the trap in Lovely Boy presented last year at the Mostra) wearing the habit and sandals of San Francesco D’Assisi. The young actor with his timeless face and the leanness of an ascetic, with his instinctive and untamed talent is as credible as Luigi Lo Cascio who plays Cardinal Ugolini, future pope under the name of Gregory XVI.
In short, Nicchiarelli signs a song of songs in a feminine key that looks to the cinema of Roberto Rossellini, but also to the punk of Derek Jarman’s early works. And it is a beautiful and intrepid challenge to talk about miracles, spirituality and revolution in the current cinematic landscape.