Voluntary servitude
Freedom is a frontier beyond which it is up to you to play, you with all your uncertainties; it's a bet, acting on the abysmal edge of certainties.
( Miguel Benasayag)
Libertad and Mateo are mother and son.
They live in a luxurious, completely pink house and black.
All their accessories and clothes are the same colors.
Theirs is an extreme mother/son relationship: addiction, sodomasochism, manipulation, madness, selfishness, sadism.
Television it mainly transmits news on North Korea: it is 2011 and shortly thereafter Kim Jong-il will die and his third son Kim Jong-un will come to power.
The images of the desperation of the subjects at the death of the dictator are represented with great uproar while Mateo is diagnosed with a brain neoplasm, a glioblastoma.
An initial extreme scene of the birth of Libertad who gives birth to her adult son, up until the images of the brain surgery on the boy ferociously indicate how much the intent of the director is not to hide anything but rather to represent in a spectacular, clear, chromatic, geometric and aesthetic way everything that concerns the body and the mind.
Although at times didactic and complacent, Casanova's message is nourished by a form rather unusual and with direct references to the extreme relationships that are created between victim and executioners and between servant and master, if not between subject and despot.
Libertad in fact compresses Mateo's life, it does not want to let him go, despite being an adult, and, if he is ill, she will be ill too.
The tiredness of illness and treatment together with psychotherapy insinuate further reasons for the search for freedom, that same freedom which will undermine the now innate habits of the boy in the luxurious cage pink in color.
The toxicity of this intimate relationship and the representation of the tales between unicorns and poisoned strawberries for population control in the People's Republic of Korea, does not allow us to circumvent the real theme of the film; the political one, power.
A film that is conceptually structured on the illustrious discourse of "voluntary servitude" by Etienne de la Boetie, on the inevitable, apparently, interdependence between peoples and rulers and beyond.
The need to feel loved and indispensable is the basis of this type of relationship where the name of the mother Libertad insinuates that true freedom is precisely that type of compression from which it is impossible to free oneself.
Habit, which in every field exercises enormous power over us, has in no other field such great strength as in teaching us servitude.
( Etienne De La Boetie)
A psychosomatic of power relations that create metastases in the body and unavoidable cages in the mind.
A Love and Death with fairy-tale and surreal contours where each one exercises the other's reason for living: a perverse symbiosis in which the servant and the master are interchangeable.
The film is a continuous, although didactic, irreverent and scandalous metaphor of power: the director confirms his extreme visionary ability as he had done with his previous film Pelle on the theme of morality.
Presented at the last TFF 40, in competition, it is a film that will provoke discussion, reflection, and "if the purpose of art is not to reproduce the visible but to make it visible” as Paul Klee claimed, this is art.
Edoardo Casanova says he was inspired by Kim Ki-duc's Pietà , certainly on the extremity of the themes, however distant in terms of formal, aesthetic and conceptual criteria .
Here there is an intimate dimension of power and politics: the situations are paradoxical, eccentric and at the same time gothic and in that excess of pink everything becomes dark and sinister.
Everything is minimal, monumental and funereal like the architecture of dictatorial regimes and beyond.
Why do men fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom?
(Massimo Recalcati)< br />
( Miguel Benasayag)
Libertad and Mateo are mother and son.
They live in a luxurious, completely pink house and black.
All their accessories and clothes are the same colors.
Theirs is an extreme mother/son relationship: addiction, sodomasochism, manipulation, madness, selfishness, sadism.
Television it mainly transmits news on North Korea: it is 2011 and shortly thereafter Kim Jong-il will die and his third son Kim Jong-un will come to power.
The images of the desperation of the subjects at the death of the dictator are represented with great uproar while Mateo is diagnosed with a brain neoplasm, a glioblastoma.
An initial extreme scene of the birth of Libertad who gives birth to her adult son, up until the images of the brain surgery on the boy ferociously indicate how much the intent of the director is not to hide anything but rather to represent in a spectacular, clear, chromatic, geometric and aesthetic way everything that concerns the body and the mind.
Although at times didactic and complacent, Casanova's message is nourished by a form rather unusual and with direct references to the extreme relationships that are created between victim and executioners and between servant and master, if not between subject and despot.
Libertad in fact compresses Mateo's life, it does not want to let him go, despite being an adult, and, if he is ill, she will be ill too.
The tiredness of illness and treatment together with psychotherapy insinuate further reasons for the search for freedom, that same freedom which will undermine the now innate habits of the boy in the luxurious cage pink in color.
The toxicity of this intimate relationship and the representation of the tales between unicorns and poisoned strawberries for population control in the People's Republic of Korea, does not allow us to circumvent the real theme of the film; the political one, power.
A film that is conceptually structured on the illustrious discourse of "voluntary servitude" by Etienne de la Boetie, on the inevitable, apparently, interdependence between peoples and rulers and beyond.
The need to feel loved and indispensable is the basis of this type of relationship where the name of the mother Libertad insinuates that true freedom is precisely that type of compression from which it is impossible to free oneself.
Habit, which in every field exercises enormous power over us, has in no other field such great strength as in teaching us servitude.
( Etienne De La Boetie)
A psychosomatic of power relations that create metastases in the body and unavoidable cages in the mind.
A Love and Death with fairy-tale and surreal contours where each one exercises the other's reason for living: a perverse symbiosis in which the servant and the master are interchangeable.
The film is a continuous, although didactic, irreverent and scandalous metaphor of power: the director confirms his extreme visionary ability as he had done with his previous film Pelle on the theme of morality.
Presented at the last TFF 40, in competition, it is a film that will provoke discussion, reflection, and "if the purpose of art is not to reproduce the visible but to make it visible” as Paul Klee claimed, this is art.
Edoardo Casanova says he was inspired by Kim Ki-duc's Pietà , certainly on the extremity of the themes, however distant in terms of formal, aesthetic and conceptual criteria .
Here there is an intimate dimension of power and politics: the situations are paradoxical, eccentric and at the same time gothic and in that excess of pink everything becomes dark and sinister.
Everything is minimal, monumental and funereal like the architecture of dictatorial regimes and beyond.
Why do men fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom?
(Massimo Recalcati)< br />
