The art of joy (2024), review by Valerio Sammarco

Modest(mind). She has been doing it since she was a little girl, when she escaped from the fire in her little house in Chiana del Bove and found shelter in a nunnery. Wild and feral, she is welcomed and protected by Mother Superior Leonora (Jasmine Trinca), who educates her in knowledge and directs her to the novitiate. But Modesta (Tecla Insolia, once a girl), now almost a woman, sees something more in that affection.

It is only the beginning of an epic, that of Modesta, told in the “cursed” novel by Goliarda Sapienza (author who will be at the center of Mario Martone’s new film, still in progress), The art of joy (who managed to have the first part published only in ’94, then in ’98 thanks to the efforts of her husband, the actor Angelo Pellegrino (yes, the one with the “ball eyes” in the Cobram Cup of Fantozzi against everyone, Stampa Alternativa published it in very few copies; only in 2008 did Einaudi publish it, 32 years after it was written…), what time Valeria Golino translates (freely, in writing with Luca Insfascelli, Francesca Marciano, Valia Santella and Stefano Sardo) into serial format for the screen (both large – the first part in theaters from 30 May, the second from 13 June, with Vision Distribution – and small , will subsequently arrive on Sky and streaming on NOW).

In six episodes (the first world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where the director is at home, this year also the protagonist of a masterclass) the first part of the novel is returned (there are 4 in total), the one that goes precisely from the childhood of the protagonist, passing through the experience in the convent, then arriving at the villa of Princess Gaia Brandiforti (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, irresistible as usual), Leonora’s mother, where she will make herself indispensable by obtaining more and more power in the palace , until arriving at the palace in Catania.

Set between 1909 and the very first post-war period, with the arrival of the Spanish fever throwing those who thought the worst was behind them back into nightmare, The art of joy knows how to link the wide-ranging story (which becomes more evident in the second part, when we discover Leonora’s past and all the intrigues relating to the Brandiforti house) to the new logics that regulate auteur entertainment: Valeria Golino (and Nicolangelo Gelormini , who directs the fifth episode) bend the density and “scandalousness” of the original novel (written between 1967 and 1976) following the trajectories of a narrative that knows how to alternate the classic dramaturgical structure – after all it is a very long coming of age which will lead Modesta to rise from the mud of her very humble origins to the rank of princess… – with the flourishes of an ultra-modern film language, the beautiful music of the Icelandic Tóti Guðnason (Lamb) and the undeniable, clearly visible production efforts (Sky Original, produced by Sky Studios and Viola Prestieri for HT Film).

In this continuous chiaroscuro which also clearly determines the path of the central character, a role of fascinating ambiguity that Tecla Insolia knows how to govern with surprising balance, the use of flashbacks becomes predominant (some decisive episodes of her childhood, such as the violence suffered by her father , the death of the goat, the first contact with his friend Tuzzu, etc., arrive in just as many crucial moments of his second life) and the insistent but never trivialized reference to the shadow which, in more than one occasion, accompanies Modesta’s progress (together with that evocative tracking shot in the roadside field where, from time to time, the dead that the girl leaves behind are added), who in that initial fire loses her mother and older sister, disabled, only the first two in a long series.

Certainly audacious in being able to convey that tumult of emancipation that animated the pages of the book, the series – which was never hidden by Golino even during the production – does not want to be a “faithful” transposition as regards the entire dynamics of facts and/or or situations, rather to embody the novel’s mutability and imbalance that characterized its nature, so nuanced, irregular and also for this reason difficult to place in “one” genre.

Period drama, coming-of-age novel with Gothic hues, contrast between rural life (“the stench of poverty will accompany you forever”) and noble affluence, everything coexists and mixes just as everything coexists and mixes in the interior of the protagonist, moved by a predetermined strategy but at the same time incapable of freeing oneself from the impulse of the most varied passions, first for Leonora (Jasmine Trinca in a role always poised between ethereal sensuality and ambiguity), then for Beatrice (Alma Noce), the youngest of the Brandiforti family , for Carmine (Guido Caprino, as usual with an indisputable charisma and stage presence), the man who manages the lands adjacent to the villa, but ends up married to Gaia’s deformed son, Ippolito (Giovanni Bagnasco), the only heir of the house.

It is therefore by exploiting on the surface the most conventional logics of patriarchal society that Modesta (Mody as Gaia renames her, after all “how sad” that adjective she had as her name…) pursues her plan of freedom to free herself from the oppression of a existence that others have established for her: “Over time, the most astute critics will highlight the stylistic and structural aspects. Maybe it will end by establishing that Mody is the most lively female character of our twentieth century. Goliarda wrote as she read, as a reader, she wrote for the purest and most distant readers, with lucid and passionate abandon, affectionate and sensual, attentive to the heartbeats of a work, more than to the concepts and forms”, wrote Angelo Pellegrino to purpose of the book (preface available on the Einaudi publication).

And Valeria Golino, after all, with her serial debut after two good films as a director (Honey, Euphoria), attempted to translate precisely this, the heartbeat of the work even before his own formrestoring its passionate matrix but without reducing it to a simple and cloying ideological manifesto.