Arianna (Ondina Quadri) is a pensive and shy nineteen-year-old studying
Chinese and living with her parents in Rome.
She decides to accompany them on a trip to Tuscany to stay in their old
holiday home, which has recently become available after being rented for most
of her life, but when they decide that they want to leave early she stays on on
her own to study and spend time with her cousin Celeste (Blu Yoshimi).
Arianna has not developed through
puberty yet and has still not had her first menstrual cycle, so she quickly
becomes fascinated in her developing and sexually awakened cousin. She also, under guidance of her father (Massimo Popolizio) a doctor, uses
hormone replacement patches and visits one of his gynecologist friends. However, after spending an awkward night with
one of Celeste’s male friends, she decides that she wants to change doctors and
learn more about her past…
Although told with a gentle and floating
pace, it is easy to guess where the story is heading (especially if you have
read The Wasp Factory…) – yet this
does not make the film any less interesting.
Arianna debuted in the Debate
section of the London Film Festival
this year, and contains enough intimacy and empathy to reflect on Arianna’s
situation.
She starts to visit a self-help group
and talk frankly for the first time with Celeste about her changing body and
feelings. Yet her time alone in the
house as she looks at herself in the mirror, and finds her mother’s old love
letters, serve to remind us that sexuality is so often something that is
discovered alone.
The contrast between the clinical and
blunt conversations with her father and the other gynecologists (especially an
intimidating scene where a number of them crowd round her during an inspection)
and the tenderness between her and Celeste highlights the power of friendship
over medical ‘advice’. The women
throughout the film, with the exception of her mother, show a sensuous
solidarity with one another that is so often missing from the vast majority of
films that fail the infamous Bechdel
Test…
Arianna is a film that looks to broaden a
conversation about gender and sexuality, and fits comfortably into a zeitgeist with
ever improving visibility and acceptance of LGBTIQ people. And newcomer Ondina Quadri gives a
performance that will easily convert you if you still have doubts about the
direction of this ever-celebratory movement…
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