But as angels of the home, women must and can be something else. They can place themselves at the head of a social upheaval, become the starting line for an anarchic push, a megaphone for injustices and social denunciations. AND, Gospel according to Mary Of Paolo Zucca. the mother par excellence, the docile and virgin Mary, is stripped of her sanctity to become a projection of an intrinsic strength to women incapable of accepting a choice not taken independently, but imposed on them.
Following the path beaten by a work that was ahead of its time – and now profoundly contemporary – like the novel of the same name by Barbara Alberti, Gospel according to Mary it becomes a reflective mirror of a present still affected by gender inequality, by feminist struggles, by the violence and injustices suffered by being a woman: the same ones that Barbara Alberti experienced in 1979 when she published her novel. The same ones that Maria lived in a Palestine transformed here into a living, authentic, timeless and eternal Sardinia.
Gospel according to Mary: two plans that do not coincide
Maria is not such a special little girl: born in Nazareth, everything is forbidden to her, even learning to read and write. But she craves knowledge, and only then can she feel truly free. Far from books, she assimilates every word in the synagogue to internalize it and repeat it, making it her own. From the audacity of the prophets she learned disobedience, she dreams of escaping on a donkey and discovering the world, going far away, perhaps to Egypt. Then one day she meets the gentle Giuseppe, finding in him not only a teacher, but also the perfect instrument to make her aspirations a reality.
Their marriage is in fact chaste, a simple cover that allows the man to secretly instruct the young woman, and then prepare her for escape. But here’s an unexpected obstacle: Mary and Joseph fall in love. They are about to abandon themselves to passion, when the angel of the annunciation ruins everything. God’s plan and Mary’s plan do not coincide at all. And so, once again, social aspiration and female resourcefulness collide, rebel, fight together and against each other.
The sacredness of visual art
In the secularity of our country, the Holy Scriptures have established themselves among the deepest roots of a collective identity which has been influenced, modeled and sometimes distorted by them in its own vision of reality. They are moments, events, which have become images from the pages. Paolo Zucca is not an evangelist, and he does not intend to be one: with his Gospel according to Mary the director rather becomes an observer scrutinizing the surrounding reality, disregarding the expectations of philological narration, to undermine its trappings and thus reveal the rot of its founding structure. Overwritten by images, the Gospel according to Mary retains a Christian reference only for the names of the characters, the key events of their lives, and those pictorial homages that have forever imprinted their lives in a gallery of stories that have entered our collective memory.
No longer saints, but imperfect men
It’s a gallery of tableaux-vivants the one that flows in front of the spectator. A cinematic story that takes up the iconographic one of moments imprinted on canvas to tell, teach, stimulate the mind even of those who could not read, but knew how to admire with their eyes. Titian, Veronese, Raphael: their brushes slide across the screen again: their two-dimensional creatures once again color an ancient world of religious origin to talk about a current situation still attached to the roots of an archaic thought. In the chromatic liveliness of the clothes, and in the arrangement of the characters on the scene, each element recalls a Renaissance-style pictorial tradition, now free of a religious character because it has been awarded a socio-cultural warning that is easily identifiable and recognizable by the contemporary public.
In this paradox, the key characters of Christian dogma they lose their sanctity, to show themselves in their fallacious humanityin a manner not dissimilar to that performed by Martin Scorsese in his The Last Temptation of Christ; even closer to the earthly and sinful nature of their spectators, it is now they, agents of taken and deconstructed behaviors – and therefore completely new and unknown compared to those traditionally handed down – who denounce both the submissive role of women and the underestimated consideration reserved for her, both by the men of the time and by the patriarchal system of 2024.
The sin of not knowing
“The real sin is ignorance”says Maria di Benedetta Porcaroli, and never as in the society of the image, what becomes a vector of knowledge, a collector of notions and wisdom, is that perpetually lit screen that illuminates our gaze, enchants us, conditions us, sometimes manipulates us and sometimes teaches us. Cinema no longer becomes a bearer only of the surrounding reality, but also of the internal one, and a product as Gospel according to Mary he tiptoes to remove that veil that makes us short-sighted, oblivious to the reality of others. By opening the eyes of some spectators, so as to make them less ignorant (because aware) about the condition of women today, Zucca entrusts his young interpreter with a vision of Mary distant from the silent and obedient figure described in the Holy Scriptures (a bit like what Susanna Nicchiarelli had previously done with her Chiara), because she is rebellious, curious, attracted by the thirst for knowledge and that art of learning that society denies her.
The framework of submission
A provocative rereading that will cause discussion and horrify many, the most chaste and pure of Christian stories turns into an essay on the female figure, who claims her independence and her right to choose: choice for a body that is hers. Choice for the man to love. Choice for adventures to undertake and choice to learn and not live in the shadow of ignorance. These are choices that are still denied to many women today, and which Zucca’s film underlines with filmic highlighters, made of long shots, which gather and unite in the moment of a glance, Mary and that world that does not feel like hers, does not understand and rejects. They are angled shots, outside the bubble, which are filled with other, deeper and implicit meanings. And so the shots strongly inclined downwards and upwards, which crush Mary against the weight of her own, submissive female gender, refer to the prevailing position of the man who dominates the woman looking at her from the heights of his own privileges. A sentence now ready to be exorcised only with the force of the cinematic gaze and of visual reproduction, capable of inserting itself into the ocular depth, reaching that cerebral hemisphere ready to interpret, assimilate, understand and internalize them. In Gospel according to Mary in fact, we need to go beyond the surface, scrutinize the preparatory drawing hidden under the dripping of color to understand its intrinsic meaning. No attempt to discredit the Christian belief, but only to shake minds, awaken consciences from their sleep.
It’s a maniacal construction, Gospel according to Mary. A framework that stimulates the vision, stimulates reflections, pushes us to analyze our contemporary society, among prejudices, inconsistencies and injustices. Yet, in this process of careful stitching, one stitch is skipped, leaving numerous holes in thebasting of such a magnetic, but not perfect, dress. The overloaded performances (especially that of Benedetta Porcaroli) which do not intend to hide their craftsmanship, have something Fellini-esque, but at the same time they suddenly slow down the otherwise well-oiled mechanism of spectator identification. The interpretation of. is more cohesive, silent and mature Alessandro Gassmann in the role of the wise Giuseppe, who in his misanthropy distances himself from that flock of almost-made villagers Pasolini’s which crowd the gaze, suffocate the viewing space, disorientate the viewer. A sin, this, which the spectator will decide whether or not to absolve, as the power of the film approaches Maria proto-feminist narrated here, or by sending it to the flames of a cinematic hell from which it is impossible to escape.
Conclusions
We conclude this review of The Gospel According to Mary by underlining how the film directed by Paolo Zucca and premiered at the 2023 Turin Film Festival, rightfully enters that restricted gallery of courageous films that are not afraid to deconstruct apparently untouchable narratives such as those of the Holy Scriptures to draft your own complaint on gender injustice and female emancipation. By exploiting the figure of Mary, the rebellion and thirst for independence that still agitates women and girls all over the world is made tangible. It’s a shame for some performances caught in overacting. The photography and visual layout are impressive, halfway between Pasolini, Fellini and paintings from the Renaissance era.
Because we like it
- The reference to Renaissance art.
- The shots are never banal, but always full of meaning.
- Alessandro Gassmann’s performance.
What’s wrong
- Benedetta Porcaroli’s performance was a little too strong at times.
- Not having charged with even more strength and determination certain passages, especially those in which the woman is subjugated by male will.
