Girls don’t cry, by Andrea Zuliani. The review

Ele – “But is there a moment when you understand what you are?”

My – “Yes, I think so, but maybe it doesn’t apply forever”

It’s all a matter of looks. When words begin to become rarer and the space between two bodies narrows more and more, canceling out the beam of light that separates two souls in search of themselves. The main scene of Andrea Zuliani’s first work takes place under a blanket, a non-place of refuge, illuminated by the colored LED lights that surround Ele and Mia, the two protagonists of this interesting road movie between Basilicata and Trentino-Alto Adige.

Zuliani’s directorial debut, premiered at the Rome Film Festival in 2022, revived this year by the just concluded Milanese festival Looks Elsewheremoves between the coordinates of the coming-of-age story and the trajectories of road movie declined in feminine style Thelma & Louise.

Both girls are looking for an immanent identity that allows them to look forward and no longer back. Ele, the youngest, a high school student, just nineteen, has not yet gotten over the loss of her father, who passed on to her the passion for photography, leaving her an analogue camera and a slightly ramshackle camper, home to the memories of a thousand family trips around the world. Mia, a young girl of Romanian origins who cleans at Ele’s school, still has the wounds of the immediate past which saw her involved in a robbery that ended badly. Due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, the two girls find themselves in Ele’s camper, which the young girl has preserved and repaired over the years. Without thinking too much, they leave. They don’t have any money but they will never look back.

Zuliani crosses past and present as if they were the two Cartesian axes of the story where, however, the physical and sentimental places of sharing an entirely feminine freedom dominate. In this sense, another directorial debut comes to mind. Simone Bozzelli’s with his Patagonia. The two first works seem to dialogue at a distance, comparing two escape situations, on the road, one male (Patagonia) and the other feminine (Girls don’t cry). But where, in Bozzelli’s film, the space of freedom was a cage from which one neither wanted nor could escape, in Zuliani’s first work freedom is not a utopia disregarded by reality, on the contrary. The two protagonists, supporting each other, complete their search for identity, reaching the awareness that this is not a definite certainty, “which is valid forever”, but constantly evolving.

Girls don’t cry it certainly has some defects in the writing phase which translate into a fluctuating progress, especially in the central phase of the story. But it is, first of all, a sincere work, which immediately abandons any type of formal ambition to put itself at the service of its protagonists, immersing itself in their gazes, in moments of tacit shared intimacy where words are not necessary and the time of reality leaves room for that of cinema.