La Lupa

La Lupaⁱ is a posthumous theatrical resurrection of rural Sicilia.

It is a very elegant, most insistently filigreed fake. I feel inclined to forgive the falsity for the reasons and in the manner we always forgive artifice : ingenious industry is what we're all about, after all. Isn't it ? So when the black of the women, technicaly correct, yes, Sicilian rural females wore mostly black, dances like abstract, meta-ballet around the white highlights of the men... as I'm aware of the falsity therefore, therefore I'm not insulted by it.

These people fished out from who knows where prettier Roman arches, more accurate and didactically relevant ancient oil presses and truly beautiful clay amphorae, beautiful in a researched, inteligent manner borne of insistent reflection and good documentation... the result would be the exact opposite of what the fucktarded generation takes for a documentaryⁱⁱ.

But all that aside, the problems of the film touch to the core. A woman loves a man, the man is not interested in her. He accepts lordship over her, lordship and not partnership. Over her, and all her things, to be sealed in the blood of her daughter ; and she aquiesces. Unhappily, but in the end... what can you do ?

For all the artifice in the world, for all the intelligence, reflection and documentation, for all the undisputable technological advancement and very dubious socio-whatever progress, what the fuck can you do ?

Not that much, as it turns out. Embers dying in a pan and a rag on an armful of hay will readily attest to the matter -- and if your rag and your pan don't, it may be not because you're "advanced" but because you're regressed. Those people -- they had no problem understanding, roundly and thoroughly around, what their pan and their rag were telling them. That you're still struggling with yours doesn't speak in your favour -- consider the silent donkeys in the film also struggle with odds and ends of human products that far exceed their capacity of going around.

1. 1996, by Gabriele Lavia, with (a very proeminently billed) Monica Guerritore and an incredible animated olive (Alessia Fugardi). [↩]
2. Have you noticed how the species decayed, by the way, under the pressure of "gonzo" ? How it's naught but unbearable dweebs talking about things they presume we agree are important, substituting their inane manner for any sort of content ? [↩]