The story of the fight for the protection of the Sardinian heritage against speculative fever is at the center of Anna by Marco Amenta. Mauro Donzelli’s review.
She wanders around as stubborn and sincere as her plot of land, rocks and sand on a plateau, between the hinterland as far as the eye can see and the sea a few meters below. She could only be titled after her protagonist, Annathe film in which Marco Amenta leaves his Sicily to pay homage to Sardinia, with a story of absolute love, between anthropological claim and resistance to yet another desire for progress, in the form of a small and irritating real estate speculation under the blackmail of jobs for all. Small communities dealing with a difficult history are often at the center of the story of the Sicilian director, who this time entrusts his challenge entirely to his protagonist, played with great empathy and free from any convention by Rose Aste. Rooted in her small reality, she lived for some years in Milan, together with her husband, from whom she separated, rebelling against the beatings and oppression that emasculated the freedom she reclaimed by returning to her, in her little village in Sardinia .
It returns marked by a scarlet letter, however, that of a woman who allowed herself to free herself from patriarchal domination. Yet he has taken over his father’s small business, he works every day in sheep farming, to produce cheese and ricotta which he then resells in the village. She is as wild as her little piece of land suddenly claimed by a new resort, whose construction begins overnight and ends up besieging her at his house. Mechanical monsters that force Anna to fight, to revolution that smacks of the restoration of a system based on ancient laws and above all on respect for the word given. Beyond the unique backdrop of a Sardinia with its pristine contradictions, Anna is a classic story of rebellion against the arrogance of the strongest, inspired by a real story. It is with the money that the big company wants to convince the young woman to rebuild her life elsewhere, leaving room for a hotel and a swimming pool, a sea view and “hundreds of jobs” that are so tempting to her fellow villagers. How can you blame him?
Anna’s is a somewhat Luddite and very anarchic battle, which in rebelling against the violence of an alleged modernity desperately tries to overcome that suffered inside the house by those who were supposed to love and protect her. It is a story of domestic and community violence, of stubbornness against everything and everyone, even the only ally, the lawyer who tries to help her, towards whom one cannot help but feel respect, rather than admiration. A small example of a territory left without rules available to those who over the years wanted to devastate it, failing to protect the main beauty, the true cultural asset of our country, its landscape. In this sense the apparently limited battle of Anna becomes a symbol – in the feminine – of a crucial work of national, geographical and social, personal and sexual protection.
