I have just escaped the immense penal colony that exists outside, a social life sentence distributed across the rigid sections of professions, class, age, so this sudden ability to be together – citizens of all social states, cultures, nationalities – cannot help but appear to me as a crazy, unthinkable freedom.
(Goliarda Sapienza)
Once called imprisonment, today it would be called revelation. Goliarda Sapienza, a non-aligned author, plunges into that interstice of the legal order called prison or the University of Rebibbia. Not out of heroism, nor out of conscious rebellion, but for an act that is both material subtraction and symbolic gesture: a theft, yes, but also an attempt at reappropriation. Not of objects, but of meaning.
It is there, in the petrified womb, that G. encounters what remains of the revolution: Roberta, a fragmentary and fierce presence, a voice of a disintegrating era, both wreck and seed. There is no need to seek a plot: the narrative is only a side effect of the forced coexistence between collapsed souls seeking a foothold. What emerges is a bond that does not ask society's permission to exist. It is not love, nor affiliation. It is contact. It is the silent questioning of what it still means, if it still means anything, to live.
The city, seen from inside a van speeding with sirens blaring, expands like a baroque theater. It is sumptuous precisely at the moment it ceases to belong. Just outside, the streets shorten, narrow, as if to reaffirm that the outside is always more of a prison than the inside. What Martone and Di Majo patiently articulate is a geography of constraint: every space is a measure of exclusion, everybody a device of resistance.
The pivotal sequence is not built around a spectacular gesture but around the visit to a former inmate who has opened a perfumery on the urban margins. A minimal yet powerful gesture: the reorganization of space in a private, almost clandestine key. Not a liberation, but a conscious retreat. The cell transposed into commerce, the prison metabolized into the everyday.
Martone films political bodies and wounded spaces without complacency. He does not embellish, he does not denounce. He reports. He makes visible what hides in daily gestures: a nakedness that is never pornography, but only exposure of being. The female body – threshold and weapon, boundary and detonator – ceases to be a narrative object to become a measure of truth. Truth that demands to be sung, even in pain. Indeed, it is in song that the film implants its most radical politicality: not in declaration, but in the obstinacy of not forgetting.
Politics here is not a matter of parties or slogans, but is imbued in the very way the characters move through space, in silences, in gestures of care. It is the politics of bodies hungry for meaning, of a femininity that no longer accepts being contained in identity formulas, but explores its ambivalences as a laboratory of the impossible.
Detention is but a threshold, a genealogy of defeat. The real abyss is the return. A Rome that seems immobile but changes direction with every glance accompanies the protagonists along an itinerary that is both defeat and aspiration. Roberta – an exceptional interpreter of an extinct youth – guides Goliarda like a toxic and visionary Virgil through the ruins of an Italy that no longer has words to describe itself. There is no redemption. Only continuity of injustice.
The 1980s loom like an aesthetic disease. The fascist massacre at the Bologna station, the narcissistic drift of the society of the spectacle, heroin as a social solvent: Martone does not narrate, he evokes. He lets History contaminate the flesh, ideology mix with blood and voice.
In this sense, Fuori is not just a film about Goliarda Sapienza. It is a film about the systemic failure of utopia. The author is only its most conscious medium. In her, the voices of the submerged, the demands of the forgotten, the urgencies of the wretched of the earth converge.
A woman born in a pre-industrial organism, the only daughter of the union between two widowers already with children, the last of ten siblings, raised among culture and militancy, kept away, as her father wished, from any school education of a regime's little Italy. A daughter of anarchists: Maria Giudice, a pioneer of Italian feminism, and Giuseppe Sapienza, a libertarian lawyer, also father to Goliardo, a half-brother who drowned at sea – perhaps killed by the mafia colluding with the regime. To him, Goliarda owes her name. To him, perhaps, and to his end, also that early awareness of struggle and loss.
Sapienza's writing – never consolatory, always oblique – inhabits every frame like an off-axis memory. But what Martone pursues is not the biography, but a condition. A philosophical posture. A will, perhaps, to sabotage every predefined order: a "certainty of doubt." The "joy" Sapienza spoke of is never directly accessible. It must be traversed like shame, like the margin.
For Goliarda, reclusion is a return to language: anti-bourgeois, visceral, Pasolinian. It is in prison that electroshock – after the seven she had endured and survived – transforms into fertile trauma, into the perceptual threshold where the unconscious becomes writing, recovery, inspiration. And if Piazza Euclide represents bourgeois order, Acqua Bullicante – so called for the presence of sulfurous gas emissions that made it bubble – becomes emblematic of its drift: irreducible, underground, unstoppable.
The relationships established in prison – mother-daughter, lover-friend, accomplice-witness – survive not for affection, but out of necessity. They are survival devices, tools through which to keep alive a humanity that elsewhere has been dismantled. There is no sentimentality. There is only a stubborn tension toward something that cannot be possessed.Something that always escapes. Something that is always elsewhere.
Fuori is a work that digs. It digs into Sapienza's texts, but also into the film tradition to which Martone has been linked over time: a cinema as survival. Above all, it digs into the present, because it knows that every reconstruction of the past is always an act of prognosis. History is not to be contemplated; it is to be questioned. And often, it does not answer.
It is no coincidence that the film conveys disorientation through walks, movements, urban drifts. Every movement is a question. Every stillness, a refusal. Valeria Golino becomes the strength and meekness, the restlessness and unpredictability of Goliarda, embodying her verticality rather than interpreting it. Even in the chorus of "others" – minor characters, social ghosts, rejects – Fuori finds its most radical truth.
A film that is somewhat makeshift, that does not console, does not explain, does not embellish. A work that chooses to remain open, exposed. Goliarda stands inside and outside life: she lives it by letting herself be lived and possesses it only through writing, when even that does not slip from her hands.
Evil lies in the words that tradition has made absolute, in the distorted meanings that words continue to bear. The word love lied, just like the word death. Many words lied, almost all of them. This is what I had to do: study the words... and then clean them of mold, free them from the encrustations of centuries of tradition, invent new ones.
(Goliarda Sapienza)
