The Story of Piera (1983)

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The story of Piera is told from the actual moment of birth in the delivery room to the date of the film. Her mother Eugenia often seems at odds with the world, indulging in eccentric behaviour within the family and outside. Her father Lorenzo, by contrast, appears a level-headed bureaucrat with a job in the then-powerful Italian Communist Party. As his wife becomes more erratic, he loses his post and suffers a collapse that puts him in a mental hospital. Piera gives up school to work for a dressmaker and follow her dream of acting, her favourite part being the Medea of Euripides, the woman who poisoned her successor and knifed her own sons when her husband left her. Eugenia's condition deteriorates, however, and she too is confined. At the end, the unmarried star of stage and television takes her fragile mother to an empty beach for an outing together.Parallel with the story of her abnormal family we see in sometimes very frank detail Piera's discovery of her sexuality: kissing games with local boys, her first period, a lesbian affair when she is hospitalised for asthma, and then men. There are also incestuous overtones involving both parents. For example, visiting her father in the institution, she reciprocates some sexual fondling to let him think he is still a male and not a neutered invalid. Beyond sex though, to my mind, is the closing moment when mother and daughter strip off in the surf and hug each other tight. Visually striking, being set in the new towns with their futuristic architecture that were built in the 1930s on the drained Pontine marshes, with many shots having a painterly composition that uses shape, colour and light to evoke moods. One example of many is a night scene when Eugenia and Piera on foot are chased and surrounded by a group of young men in cars who threaten gang rape. The main light comes from the headlamps, which become sinister emblems of violence and dominance, exuding not benign natural light but harsh artificial light. Eugenia wrong-foots the aggressors by smashing the pairs of headlamps one after another, symbolically emasculating her attackers. Tremendous acting from the three principals, even though the two women had to be dubbed. Mastroianni is wonderful as the caring husband who gradually becomes unhinged. Huppert has the gifts to reveal the inner desperation and determination that Piera shares with her favourite dramatic rôle. And Schygulla deserved more than her Cannes award for her courageous performance as an impossible woman, appearing like a cheap tart initially but in the end a pale wraith with no make-up under cropped hair reminiscent of Joan of Arc. Recommended to all who can appreciate a tale told from the women's point of view, where the real story is below surface actions and words in the complex web of emotions.

How to appraise this drama? Very difficult task, the plot does not follow any logic, the family is irrational, the father is a man always busy and letting his crazy wife to do with her body whatever she wants, her girl seems to be more rational but at the end she also became as mad as her mother, her incestuous relationships with father and mother were evident, she was sometimes lesbian and sometimes the opposite. She even competed with his mother in sex. What was the objective of Marco Ferreri with this film? I do not know, the film finished and I was as empty as at the very beginning. Just a waste.

Piera's story is that of a young girl whose sexual awakening is not only tolerated but actively encouraged by her parents, with whom she seems to have some kind of an incestuous relationship. The disturbing subject matter is not what is wrong with this film, though. This is a film with loose scenes, no discernible plot, secondary characters that appear and disappear at random, nonsensical dialogue... Hey, if you want to challenge our morals by showing mother and daughter kissing naked on the beach that's fine, but try to do it in a way that is watchable. I will never forgive myself for not following my impulse of leaving after 15 minutes.