During the Covid epidemic, among the experts we wondered if the Lockdown, one day, would have been told to the cinema and, if so, as it would have been done. When the worst was now behind, many people agreed that not, it would not have been possible and that the public would not have liked to relive that moment to the cinema or elsewhere. For what for many it was an impossible company for Stefano Sardo, author and director of her walls, evidently represented a challenge. The Lockdown and Covid epidemic in this thriller are central elements that determine actions and reactions of the characters of this story.

You die of her, the plot and the characters

On the eve of Lockdown Luca (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Maria Chiara Giannetta) are trying to become parents thanks to the help of her father, Antonello (Paolo Pierobon), primary in a clinic specialized in infertility therapies. A man without hair on the tongue, with sudden and tract ways, who continues to play a dominant role against his daughter and son -in -law who, thanks to him, can afford to live in a large house in the center of Rome. The same evening in which Giuseppe Conte proclaims the Lockdown, at the door of Luca and Sara, Amanda (Mariela Garriga) presents a young woman who says she was closed out of her B&B located right on their own landing.
Amanda is beautiful, sensual, transgressive and her ways of making conquer Luca, a man who feels “helpless”, metaphorically castrated by not being able to have children but above all from his inability, for obvious limits, facing the father -in -law and to be up to the hero hero who died to save two children from the flames.

The story with Amanda, immediately says the voiceover at the beginning of the film, will ruin his life. Or perhaps life has ruined it alone, he terracotta vase in the midst of many iron vessels, crushed on several fronts by the dominant personalities who bind his life. There is the off -scale Machism of the father -in -law, the bursting sensuality of the neighbor and a perfect wife who has renounced the place in the clinic to work in the public and is now facing a Covid epidemic. You die of her is the tragedy of an ordinary man who revolves around the inability of the character of Riccardo Scamarcio to be, all the way, the hero he would like to become. A character of which the many faces are immediately evident, his hypocrisies and for which it is really difficult to experience empathy. But this is not the point. Although at times sketched, the Luca di Scamarcio is a three -dimensional character whose various facets we see: feminist and fedifrago, sensibilies and unscrupulous, endowed with good will but without the courage necessary to complete his goals. An entirely interesting type, especially in this moment of crisis of the male and his, inevitable, recourse: the return of sexism to power.

Enough with the holy women or attempts

In dies of her the level of tension is not high. Although full of twists, the rhythm is affected in many points and the vision – despite the duration that can be tackled, only 99 ‘, cheers – becomes slow and cumbersome. But it is a film full of current ideas and ideas such as infertility and gender -based violence. But it is precisely here that something does not come back.
Over the decades, from the lyric to literature, passing, of course, for the cinema, the female characters have been very stereotyped. Moreover, the role of the woman was for millennia on the margins and everything, from science to religion, saw the woman as an object and not as a subject, an other figure compared to man (the rib of Adam) and not a person with his identity. The alleged “mystery” of femininity derives from having never investigated her, neither in the medical field nor in terms of narration.

For these reasons, the main connotations of the female characters have always been two: that of the Saint and that, so let’s put it of the harlot. The saint is the angelica woman, the Madonna without sin, a high figure in the ideals and morally flawless. To him the man looks with boundless admiration, possibly wondering “but how he does” and saying to himself and to her “I don’t deserve”. If it sounds familiar to you, it is not so much because you have heard it from a partner or friend, but because these stereotypes are so rooted in our imagination that they are real commonplaces. Opposite to the Saint is the deceived, the double -sided, the temptress who induces the man in temptation. This character is also almost everywhere, from the films to the songs of Sanremo (do you present beautiful bitch or beautiful without soul?). It is the character that in the noir is the femme fatale, the one who arrives in the life of the protagonist and overwhelms it, the one who hides a mystery and that calls our hero to adventure while his counterbalance, the saint, waits for him patient at home. After all, how could she think badly of her man, so foreign how it is about lie and sin?

These are old schemes and characters like the world and that in fact we carry with the dawn of the time. Yet, in recent years, these stereotypes have been heavily questioned. To make two very recent examples: Anra, the winning film to the latest Oscars, overturns the stereotype and shows us the story from the point of view of the Merrice. And it is a film written and directed by a man. The Subastance showed us the pressure and torture to which women must undergo to please the male gaze. Not to mention the global success of Barbie and the Italian one of is still tomorrow. In short, steps forward in these years have been made and the public seems to like it. Yet the impression is that, in general, our country lets all this slip.
You die of her is the perfect example. There are two women, Amanda and Sara, who perfectly follow the stereotypes of the saint and the Famme Fatali. The Chiara and La Mora, the girl of a good family and the foreigner, one who saves lives and the other that ruins and puts herself in trouble, one of blue dressed blue, the other with fatalona boots, black make -up on the eyes and dark glasses from diva. Amanda is not only a vendial and unfair attempting, but it is above all a serial liar who lets himself be overwhelmed by emotions (the impulsive woman) dragging the unaware and impotent male with him in the face of such unfair but above all the cotante sensuality. The male, fool, who does not wonder why a woman who lives and lives in Rome must rent a B&B, a question that instead persecutes the viewer or the spectator for all 99 minutes of the film. On the other side there is Sara, who remains unaware to the end, taken by the nose by his father, husband, neighbor and who does not ask why the fridge is empty despite the husband always goes shopping as in the scene of Fantozzi’s baker.

You die of her had all the credentials to be an interesting film starting from her setting, the Lockdown, used here in an extremely intelligent way. Too bad for the voice champion (superfluous) and for the female characters caged in truly indigestible stereotypes. But perhaps it is only the cinema that adapts to the times that run and, if so, it would be a real shame.

Do you die of her leave the room on Thursday 21 March

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ynzdxhwucucu