Out It is one of those films that you cannot miss. Not if you believe in an Italian cinema that knows how to go to unexplored beaches, who knows how to renew itself, go beyond the stagnation that has distinguished it for a long time, too much time. In Cannes 2025 the story of Goliarda Sapienza, his inside and out of prison, walks on the sweatshirts of a Valeria Golino Magnifica, and is a small, great redemption for our cinema, after many sufferings and poor results.

Out – The plot

For Goliarda Sapienza (Valeria Golino), life is at a dramatic and uncertain turning point. In that 1980 he ended up behind the bars for theft, after stealing the jewels at a friend’s house, for a strange sense of revenge, out of necessity and also to take revenge on the contempt collected because of the poverty that has overwhelmed it in recent times. In Rebibbia, where it does not remain so much, he knows a female humanity of the strangest, most dramatic yet visceral that can be imagined. In particular with the young Roberta (Matilda De Angelis), he ended up behind the bars because they are connected to extreme left terrorism. But then there is also Barbara (Elodie) who dreams of embracing her man, and many others who try how they can resist, to remain women, to cultivate dreams. Prison exit, maintains a deep friendship bond with Roberta, a girl full of life but also deeply marked by trauma, drug addiction, by those ideals to which she does not feel like giving up. He lost in a Rome filled by an asphyxiating sun, in an auto -driving loneliness, the two women will support each other, while trying to understand what to do with their lives out of prison.

Out It is one of the most visceral, but also more balanced films, that Mario Martone has ever given us. Very risky, bold, female story sewn together with Ippolita di Majo, from the first to the last minute, tries to make us understand the world view, the life of a writer, a woman, unique in importance and relevance. Valeria Golino, the best of our actresses of the last thirty years, is a goliarda wisdom eternally girl, even if in the middle of the middle -aged crisis and beyond. He lives on the parioli in a house that is about to lose, but his real world is that of sunny women, desperate yet free, those that certainly are not in the good Radical Chic lounges from which he ran away with that childish and desperate theft. Poverty for Martone makes humble, makes true, there is more humanity in that calcined and desperate Rebibbia, where every social distance is reset, than in deserted, ruthless and life -free Rome in which he guides us, making use of a sensational photograph by Paolo Carnera, which enhances the warm colors always and in any case. This is a cinematic Rome very different from the usual American one, it is periphery, it is terms, it is the absence of sacredness, it is solitude in a labyrinth.

The meaning of a being together beyond the schemes

Mario Martone chooses a direction that works extreme by extremely the reference with the horizon, denies the regularity of movement and connection, revolves around these two souls, two different and yet similar rebels in confessing everything and nothing at the same time. If the Golino is very good in his being under the lines, passive but not inactive towards the world, Out It also has the merit of restoring a meaning to Matilda De Angelis, in the last two years ended up in a lot of projects that are sometimes truly poor. Here, however, it is a fragile and indomitable elf, it is the face of the defeat of the generation of ’68, the one that wanted to change the world and instead the world has changed them. Then there is Elodie, who manages to hold the coexistence on the screen well with his Barbara, the most normal and basically logical of the three, the least extreme. Out The male sex puts him aside. Apart from the Albert of Antonio Gerardi, the pilgrim angel of Corrado Dionisi, husband, friend, accomplice of Goliarda, also almost unreal in his empathy, in his understanding of that unhappy soul, convinced that he does not know how to write despite being perfectly conscious to be, ready to make history with his “the art of joy” that will change everything.

Out Perhaps he has a small drop in the final, Martone loves the saying-not said, sometimes makes it a disproportionate use, but as he knows how to embrace the indefiniteness of that story, of that relationship between women to whom he does not give a name and a formula, stroking and then avoiding a eroticism that is actually desperate affection, there is a hat to take off. But this is also an anti-Italian film, if we mean the condemnation of the blindness and class violence of our world, of this Rome that Martone fears, as well as its protagonist, something that will surely have disappointed part of the criticism, which asks for it without laying the beauty already seen every damned time. Goliarda Sapienza will be honored only after her death, a pagan rite with which our country every damned time must deal with its immobility, its inability to understand that it counts for the hour and now. Reality? After the thud of Parthenope by Paolo Sorrentino last year, Cannes is where Mario Martone relaunches our cinema of women, on women, for women. He does it above all without a bit of moralism, of paternalism, letting everything become a way to understand how and why the words of Goliarda Sapienza have been so important.

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