THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
It’s an elemental film, in the sense that it’s all about land, water, and sky. Inhabited by the quivering of the waves and the wind, the first feature film by Italian director Laura Samani, presented at Cannes during Critics’ Week in July 2021, is adorned with a magnetic grace and a remarkable sobriety.
An island in Frioul, at the very beginning of the 20th centuryand century. Agata (Celeste Cescutti), a young woman with fair hair and black eyebrows like her gaze, has just given birth to a stillborn child. According to Catholic tradition, the village priest refuses to baptize those who have not lived, condemning them to wander in limbo. To give her daughter a name, Agata flees from this fishing community and sets out on a journey to the snow-capped mountains of the north where there is a place of miracles: a “breathing sanctuary” or “truce sanctuary”, there where his little anonymous, animated by a divine breath, will be able to inspire just once and save his soul.
Fantastic force and mysticism
Beyond the documented story – these sanctuaries existed by the hundreds in the Alps, including two hundred in France, until the 19and century – Piccolo Corpo shapes the beautiful idea that Agata’s pilgrimage can be just as much a bridge between the living and the dead as the accomplishment of a revolt. With her dead baby on her back, placed in a small wooden box, the young woman defies her suffering, right in the middle of nature as enveloping as it is surly. His meeting with Lynx (Ondina Quadri), a kind of Robin Hood, solitary and secret, who we don’t know if he is a man or a woman, will bring him protection.
Between realism and symbolism, the film offers striking contrasts, the most beautiful scenes of which transform the exhausted and bloody body of the pilgrim into an aquatic reverie.
Filmed largely in natural light, to the sound of traditional songs from Friuli a cappella, the grandiose setting lets itself be infiltrated imperceptibly by a fantastic force, as if it were just another facet of reality, perhaps its destiny. From one end to the other, time fades: if the journey, trying, lasts only a few days, it seems to cross the seasons back and forth, without following any chronological order, as if Agata were detached from the real world to touch mysticism.
Between realism and symbolism, the film offers striking contrasts, the most beautiful scenes of which transform the exhausted and bloodied body of the pilgrim into an aquatic reverie. Few twists, few dialogues, few suspense, Piccolo Corpo focuses on the unfailing faith of its heroine who evokes the fate of the victims of the bloodthirsty tales of the Brothers Grimm and risks austerity.
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