Crossing Streets Free of Violence

“The streets that women cross are streets free of violence”: the slogan of the Italian feminist organization Non Una Di Meno (Not One Less) seems echoed in Delia’s quick, confident stride as she crosses the city each day on her way to her various jobs. From the seemingly submissive woman in the family sphere, she becomes determined. She defies her husband’s authority, notably by stopping at the garage of her childhood sweetheart, a kind, shy man who is about to leave to look for work in the North and who invites her with his eyes to accompany him. But she also — above all — defies convention with her best friend, Marisa, with whom she smokes, laughs, and drinks coffee at the bar, sweetening it generously under the bartender’s reproachful gaze.

Marisa, masterfully played by Emanuela Fanelli, is Delia’s closest confidante. She is a strong woman who suffers the absence of children in her life, which paradoxically puts her in a better position than Delia. All the women who appear in this film are important, whatever their role: from the laundresses to the neighbors with whom Delia’s daughter sits as she waits for the latest violent scene in the family home to end. But it is undoubtedly Marcella, played by a dazzling Romana Maggiora Vergano, who is the key figure, the catalyst for Delia’s emancipation. It is for her sake that Delia withholds part of the money she earns from her husband, for the bright future she wishes for her daughter, first and foremost within the framework imposed by Italian society: a good marriage to the son of a petty bourgeois family, owners of a café, enriched by their trade with the Nazis during the bloody nine-month occupation of Rome.

Beyond Marcella’s anger at her mother, the director weaves the mother-daughter bond through the glances they exchange: Marcella’s, a mixture of fear, compassion, and despair, a haunting gaze in which the violence suffered by her mother is imprinted, and Delia’s, tender and harsh at times, but in which hovers the hope of a better future for her daughter, in which she knows she must play a prime role. Isn’t her own submissiveness setting the tone for Marcella to do the same? Isn’t her own liberation the condition for her daughter’s freedom?

Empowerment

Suddenly, a bang: the café of Marcella’s future in-laws burns down under the watchful eyes of Delia and William, a young African American GI who has seen the marks left on her body by Ivano’s blows. They met by chance during her travails in Rome. Also an oppressed man, lost in an eternal city whose language he doesn’t speak, William has lost the only link to his distant family in the United States, a photo that Delia discovers on the ground in the mud and returns to him. William wants to help her get out of hell. Their various encounters unfold like a dream, culminating in the surreal scene of the café explosion to prevent Marcella’s marriage to the man who turns out to be a variation of Ivano.

Delia rebels against the commandments of a patriarchal, sexist society that is also preparing to crush her daughter. Cortellesi entrusts her heroine’s empowerment to a letter, the first one she receives. Delia reads it, hides it, crumples it up, throws it away, picks it up, reads it again, loses it. . . a letter that the director makes us believe is from the other man, the good man, the mechanic, her childhood sweetheart. But wouldn’t it be rather limiting if that was all it was?

In a whirlwind, the last minutes of the movie reveal the meaning of this folded envelope — a ballot paper — and this story, a story of struggle for emancipation. Not just Delia’s, but that of all the women who came together in public for the first time on June 2, 1946, to make their voices heard after twenty years of fascism. On that day, Italy chose the Republic over the monarchy, which had collaborated closely with Fascism. Not just any election, but a vote that reflected the achievements of several years of armed resistance to fascism, in which women had participated.

It would be wrong to think, as some critics have suggested, that Cortellesi reduces women’s emancipation to the chance to cast a vote. In fact, June 2, 1946, was the culmination of the victorious struggle of a collective movement, to which the explosion of the collaborators’ café also refers. It was a vote for social change that paved the way for republican Italy and the writing of the most progressive postwar constitution, which has been under constant attack for over forty years by the forces currently in power in Italy.

To the tune of Daniele Silvestri’s “A bocca chiusa,” a choral ending that thumbs its nose at the silence imposed on women, the final scene resembles a women’s demonstration:

I’m singing today in the middle of the people / Because I believe or maybe out of decency / That participation is freedom, of course / But it’s also resistance . . . to that old idea that we’re all equal . . . with just this tongue in my mouth and if you cut my tongue too, I won’t stop and I’ll sing with my mouth closed . . . look how many people know how to answer with their mouths closed too.

The power of this collective of women who decide to take part in the vote and who sing “even” with their mouths closed stuns Ivano. It links Delia’s individual fate to that of the women on the march, to that of Marcella, who for the first time, full of recognition and emotion, looks at her mother, whom she has liberated and who liberates her in return.

In Italy, Cortellesi’s movie outsold not only Barbie (released at the same time), but also Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful. This success proves, if proof were needed, that the director has succeeded in speaking to a new generation of women and men, in a country where a woman dies every four days at the hands of her partner or ex-partner; a country that only legalized divorce in 1970 and abortion in 1978, a law that is trampled underfoot every day by the refusal of entire gynecological departments across the peninsula to enforce it; a country that only outlawed “honor killings,” i.e., legal feminicide, in 1981 and only changed the definition of rape in 1996 (until then, it had been associated with a “crime against public morals”); a country recently condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for gender stereotyping and sexual violence; a country now ruled by right-wing parties that refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention on gendered violence in the European Parliament.

“To write women’s history is to fight against the great nocturnal silence that always threatens to swallow them up,” wrote French historian Michelle Perrot. Cortellesi’s film is a particularly successful representation of this ongoing struggle, in which nothing is ever taken for granted, because there’s still tomorrow. Poetic, moving, political, dreamlike, and surprising, this is a great modern fable not to be missed.