Everyone's crazy about Goliarda Sapienza, Mario Martone's "Fuori" enchants at the Cannes Film Festival

“For me it was like falling in love, getting engaged and then marrying her, I hope she’s happy, but I think so because she’s giving me good signals ”. So Valeria Golino returns to talk about her beloved Goliarda Sapienza at the 78th Cannes Film Festival where she gives her body and soul in Fuori by Mario Martone, the only Italian film in competition. The relationship between Golino, both as an actress and director, with the writer began years ago and has seen many declinations, from the meeting on the set of Francesco Maselli (Goliarda’s ex-husband) to the ambitious project as a director, fresh from the success at the David di Donatello, the series L’arte della gioia.

This is the first thing that Valeria Golino emphasizes in her meeting with the Italian press. “We met for the first time when I was 18. She was a lady at the time, younger than I am now though: to me, who was 18, she seemed like an old lady, but with the mind of a girl. She was very curious about me, more curious than I was. I visited her house, the same house where, forty years later, I will arrive playing her, so it is clear that personally it is something that touches me, it gives meaning to what I do.” For five years, Martone instead nurtured the idea of ​​a biopic on Goliarda Sapienza: “ We were thinking of making a biopic on Goliarda Sapienza with Valeria ,” he says, “ when we talked about it, our producers told us that the rights to L'Arte della Gioia had just been taken by her, so the crossover was magical.”

The team for the making of the film comes with a different approach to the writer's life, intuited by Ippolita Di Maio, historic co-screenwriter of all the films of the Neapolitan director: " Years have passed, Valeria has made her wonderful film but I was quite fixated on this idea of ​​a biopic" - Martone recalls and continues: "until at a certain point instead Ippolita made me read a different subject. I felt that that was the film I wanted to make, I felt liberated because it no longer had any of the impositions of a biopic, it told of a summer in Rome in 1980, the friendship between these women, their wandering in a road movie, there was also the Rebibbia prison. Everything took place like this in a summer where nothing really had to happen but everything had to be".

Fuori draws inspiration from two novels by Goliarda Sapienza, L'università di Rebibbia and Le certezze del dubbio , in which the writer recounts her brief time in prison (for a jewel theft) and her encounter with the women inside, in an experience that, once out, allowed her to be reborn, to feel less “out” of place, “out” of herself and to find herself again. It is precisely from these encounters that the bond between the protagonist and Roberta is born, a Matilda De Angelis who, already among the most internationally known actresses, consecrates herself to the public of auteur cinema and festivals confirming rare intensity and delicacy. In their adventures to discover an unusual Rome, to be discovered and rediscovered by Goliarda, Barbara also appears, another cellmate, played by Elodie, in her third and definitive test as an actress. For those who knew her as a writer and also breathed her thanks to the serial transposition of her novel The Art of Joy , know that, among Sapienza's great "cinematographic" abilities there was the tendency to consciously mix reality with imagination, a characteristic that "unleashes a director" comments Martone, even if it is a challenge.

“Reality and imagination play an important role in the film, which is also the most important role for us human beings. No one saves themselves alone, and it is a great phrase that we must never forget, but no one saves themselves without imagination. It is what somehow brings you back to yourself when you are lost in the prison of the world”. In his story of freedom, Martone looks at Valeria Golino, Elodie, Matilda De Angelis with a welcoming but firm gaze. A director who, by his own statement, “ let himself drift, carried by the wind of Goliarda Sapienza and her protagonists”. “Mario looked at us carefully. He is everything an actor desires: to be seen, when needed. He leaves you free, but protects you. And if you go outside, he catches you again and brings you back inside” praises Golino.

Of her character, who belongs to Martone as much as to Goliarda Sapienza, Matilda De Angelis says: “Roberta is a person who at a certain point almost became a literary character: what moved me was the idea of ​​playing Roberta through Goliarda's eyes, eyes that carried with them the love, sensitivity, dignity, respect, beauty with which she looked at her, and then I was looked at with those eyes by Valeria Golino, and before that by Mario and Ippolita. For me, to date, she is perhaps the most beautiful character that has been given to me, the strongest”. Set in 1980 in Rome, Fuori is also indirectly a political film, showing an Italy that was perhaps abandoning the Years of Lead? “ No, they were still alive, I knew the Rome of the 80s because as a kid I went there to follow the avant-garde theater. I have always been convinced that it is wrong to talk about those years as only the Years of Lead, they were also years of great utopia, freedom, imagination, artistic experimentation and human experimentation. Seeing pain and contradictions, Goliarda had to deal with all of this, and the character of Roberta allowed politics to be put on the horizon”.

In addition to being released in theaters on May 22, Fuori will have a preview today at the Teatro Ariston in Sanremo, in connection with 170 other Italian theaters. Despite the excitement for their film, Mario Martone and Valeria Golino first and foremost, but also the entire Fuori delegation, certainly cannot ignore the climate that is felt in Italy with the open letter to Minister Giuli, which they signed: “ I believe that there is a problem that has been highlighted and that is that of urgency. Something must be done as soon as possible – declares Martone – because the state of the cinema is certainly in difficulty, films are not being released and therefore people are not working. This is a certain fact that must be addressed. When we say that people are not working, we are not only thinking of directors and actors but of workers, factory workers, electricians and stagehands, thousands of people. There is a request to be listened to and we are also confident that a dialogue is possible”.

FROM

Chiara Nicoletti