Filmic Orientalism Made in Italy

Silvio Soldini, acclaimed director of Bread and Tulips, is enamored with postcolonial encounters along the Italian peninsula. In his last effort, “Cosa voglio di piu’” translated as “Come undone” (I’ll never understand the rationale behind films’ titles translation) he depicts the illicit relationship between the autochthon Anna, blonde professionally-driven woman and Domenico, dark hair Greek-god-like-body with unskilled job. The setting is a provincial town nearby an obscure 21^st century Milan. The story is irrelevant if it wasn’t for Soldini’s new narrative technique that hides passages to the audience. If Anna uses her cell phone we’ll know that she is calling Domenico. However, the scenes are temporally and spatially disconnected. Perhaps a finesse of Allenian tradition.

The tropes of the story are relevant to people who explore the multiple constructions of differences. Domenico is a migrant from the South of Italy; he jokingly says “I’m from Saudi Calabria” using a discursive proximity that in the Italian collective imaginary means uncivilized. Leave alone the fact that extremely wealthy Saudi Arabia has nothing do to with economically depressed Calabria.

Anna instead is from the imaginary dorm city where her working class family represents an achor to the territory contrary to the instability of Domenico’s life. They both live in cemented blocks with little green space but while Anna’s partner is a fixer, Domenico’s partner lives in domestic disorder. The migrant family is represented as incapable of keeping European civilazation within the household, of educating children, and of conducting a financially dignifying life.

Anna and Domenico are cheaters but while Domenico’s wife makes a southern scene when she finds out, civilized Anna’s partner says “let’s go to sleep as it has been a dense day.” Towards the end of film when the story seemed to be ended, the narrative takes a turn and the cheating couple is spending a weekend in Tunisia. Again, Soldini doesn’t reveal the intricacy of the plot that took them to the “real” North Africa. But Anna’s civilization strickes again: her partner calmly let her chose to go for a weekend with her lover so that she could decide what to do. Domenico, instead, machistically left without saying anything to his wife.

The end is maybe expected because Anna and Domenico’s affair even if physically involving never transmitted deep feelings. Like the dorm town where they live, everything has a passionless rhythm perhaps to define civilization as uneventuful.