If the words “Valeria Golino prison fight” seem an unlikely combination, never fear: the veteran Italian director Mario Martone gleefully stage one of these in his Cannes Palme d’Or contender “Fuori.” Best known to younger audiences for her role as the Adèle Haenel character’s mother in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” multi-hyphenate Golino seems to have dedicated much of her recent career to exploring the legacy of the vaunted Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza: directing a 2024 prestige miniseries based on her avowed masterpiece “The Art of Joy” and now playing her in Martone’s “Fuori” at an auspicious moment in her life and career. Roberta’s bond with Goliarda is both the closest and the testiest: the former’s rap sheet is also as someone from family means drawn to the “low life,” with multiple busts for heroin abuse and mysterious connections to the country’s feared Red Brigades militia (who, only two years earlier, kidnapped and murdered the Christian democratic prime minister Aldo Moro). The narrative structure braids her prison experience, episodes from her earlier life, and the present and future where she’s fully re-constructing herself, and the film attempts to find its ending catharsis through a painful verbal fight, followed by a surprise revelation involving the two characters, with the latter failing to create the smooth storytelling end-point it might have.
Author: Kate Erbland
Published at: 2025-05-20 21:55:00
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