Riparo

i’m going to waste some breath here on an italian film i just saw which no one on this blog will, and probably should, watch. It’s about a lesbian couple who, coming back from a lovely holiday in tunisia, finds hidden in the trunk a stowaway moroccan kid (17? 18?). in fact, this is not exactly what happens. it is one of the lovers, a conflicted and tender maria de medeiros, who sees the boy while looking for something in the trunk. she doesn’t tell her girlfriend mara until they are safely in italy and in a deserted place. in fact, she doesn’t tell her at all; she just darts to the back of the car and lets the poor kid, who’s by now cramped, sick, and dehydrated, out of the miserable tight spot in which he has spent at least 24 hours.

so this is the set up: woman finds boy in trunk but doesn’t tell girlfriend about it in the 24 hours that intervene between the finding and the boy’s release from his hiding spot.

at first you think, well, maybe she was afraid the girlfriend would be pissed. but there’s more to the story. anna is the owner, with her mother and brother, of a successful shoe manufacturing business in which mara, played by slovakian model antonia liskova, is an assembly line worker. (the casting is interesting: all leads are non-italian born, and, of the two who are supposed to be italian, one, de medeiros, has an unconvincing foreign twang).

so, the secrecy with which anna smuggles in the moroccan boy, anis, betrays the structure of the two women’s relationship: anna, wealthy and older, is a caretaker, mara, poor and young, harbors anger and resentment. in spite of their best efforts, they end up being, respectively, the parent and the child, the one is charge and the one who’s being taken care of and who has little say in the family’s workings. anna can be irritating, i suppose, in her constant, relentless pursuit of everyone’s happiness. she’s sweet, kind and generous. she lets anis crash with them and even gets her brother to find him a job in the stocking department, where all the employees are foreign born. all the while, mara protests and gets mad to no avail. but i found her an interesting and captivating character. maybe it’s that i don’t mind sweetness one bit, even when it becomes blind and overdriven. also, i find her position of privilege tricky in a tragic sort of way. she truly shares everything with mara, and, at some point, when things start going south, she proposes that they take off and leave their lives behind, start from scratch. but privilege breeds resentment in those who are less privileged, and it seems to me there is no other way to deal with it than lots of talking and forgiving and accepting. privilege needs forgiveness too.

which is exactly what does not happen. neither wants to talk about this, not really. they try to fix it in bed but it’s not good enough. at the end, anna and anis, the underprivileged, forge a bond that destroys all of their lives.

the reason why i found this film so interesting is that when i left italy, 20 years ago, immigration was really a small thing which affected, mostly, italians’ summer lives. at the seaside — italians go on holiday to the sea en masse in july and august — there would be african men walking up and down the beach peddling knock-off brand clothing and other wares. since they used to call out “vu cumprà!” a distortion of “do you want to buy?”, they were, probably still are, universally called vuccumprà. even my little self cringed at the whole interpersonal and social dynamics of this phenomenon.

i always assumed those people, who were obviously illegals, would go back to their countries in the winter. but then the iron curtain came down, the world economy went to shit, and massive numbers of people from eastern europe, asia, and africa started pouring into europe. one summer i went to italy and the country was dramatically transformed. it had gone from white, provincial, and monolingual to multi-colored, international, multi-lingual, and very, very racist. it’s really astounding to me now to see the neighborhood where i and my family always lived (where my family still lives), a very tightly-knit, lower-middle class neighborhood in which everyone knew everyone else, criss-crossed by people from all over the world. it is not difficult to see how easily racism awakes inside people, how the invasion of what, for right or for wrong, we have come to consider “ours” may cause some pretty vicious reactions from even the mildest of people.

in any case, this film comments on the cancer caused by the infiltration of the other into the unexamined life, which, being unexamined, is much more precarious and ready to be infected and go necrotic. all the characters mean well and do well, yet their lives crumble because there is no real understanding of what’s going on before AND after the other penetrates their little orderly lives and forces the fissures wide open.

i forgot to mention that anna’s business has another factory in romania that makes more money for them because the labor is much cheaper. the moral is: you try to keep it all together, try to pretend it’s all right when it isn’t, but it’s gonna burst and come apart so so easily you won’t know it until the pieces lie all around you and you sit right in the middle of the devastation.