La minorenne

La minorenneⁱ is by and large gunk, with two shining exceptions, between them long enough to almost cover the space of an advertising break. Blink and you've missed them ; I wouldn't go as far as to say they make this film anything therefore, but I also can't pass them in silence.

Guglielmi, a forty-eight year old who nevertheless somehow manages to look seventy-nine, constructs a memorable character out of thirty seconds and the sparse nothings available in these mean, below-direct-to-video productions. Somehow. I don't know how. In spite of that painfully ineptⁱⁱ scullery maid he's stuck acting with, in spite of the metaphorical grime all around, his "How did it end so cursedly" crowning utterance upon a genuine, directly apprehensible if painfully, slowly erected tower of common life echoes, and keeps right on echoing. It's still ringing in my ears, the day after the night during. How, just how did it ? Hai cinquantatre anni e una vita devastata. Come tutti noi. Allora, invece di farci la morale e di guardarci con antipatia, dovresti guardarci con affetto. Siamo tutti sull'orlo della disperazione. No habiamo altro rimedie que guardarci en faccia e farci compagnia, prenderci in giro. O... no? goes the inquiry, and indeed. A polite man, a cultivated man, a patient, laborious man trying for the best, always, always for the best. Pero... come mai... ?

Then there's the situation where the director -- and I've no doubt it's the director -- manages to extract out of the brute material of a normally developed teenagerⁱⁱⁱ a living icon of those vague, imprecise, approximately erotic, slightly murdersome cvasi-sexual fantasies of the flowered young woman (which is to say, before being deflowered, but after having something there to be deflowered in the first place). An abundance of teenagers -- just as lanky, just as absent^iv -- have shared enough of themselves with me over the years, both explicitly and implicitly, for the recognition to readily form : this, indeed, is something. Something deep and true and more young woman than you'll likely ever touch (in very slight part because not anymore, the counterfit distractions of socialism cut the thread in people at an even earlier age, so even something as basic as the normally developped fifteen year old is becoming rare in common experience). That's rather how pre-penis female fantasies of meta-girl life look like, feel like, taste like, with the bizarre cross and the strange fixated faces "watching" and with the tits and so on and so forth.

The film immediately falls down once the boys are introduced, because, amusingly enough if just as inescapably obvious... the crew just didn't know how to write for a man. The regrettable ordures of Italy's own graduates, even weaker sauce, immediately drown anything and everything ; and then the "politically correct" absurdities of the time, well... frankly, the production never had a chance, from the get-go. It started as the attempt at building a Dyson sphere by some suburban middle school science club. So... we shall be thankful for what it managed, and move on, without concluding that the deliberate organization of suburban middle school science clubs is a worthy expenditure of public funds.

1. 1974, by Silvio Amadio, with Gloria Guida, Augusto (Marco) Guglielmi. [↩]
2. Her "rekindle intimacy with adolescent daughter returned from boarding school" scene looks so much like a -- bad, tritely bad -- lesbian scene it makes skin crawl. [↩]
3. Gloria Guida is nothing more and nothing besides a biotypical adolescent female that's willing to (somewhat, but still, more than the other stupid cunts then contemporary) show it. Her eye's dead, unlike say Lynn's. Her face is dead, as dead as any fish that ever slowly asphixiated in a hobbyst's "aquarium" / slow choker by accumulation of unwanted metabolytes. She's more of a houseplant than most houseplants ever were, except for the part where she looks just like what "we" were fucking back then -- meaning just me. Besides her functioning as a walking, occasionally talking vaginal mold she has no practical function, and I suspect no capacity for any function. [↩]
4. The idea that adolescents are present within their bodies, or within their lives, is at best approximative itself. [↩]