A bittersweet look at Goliarda Sapienza, an abandoned writer

Italian writer and occasional actress Goliarda Sapienza is the character to whom he dedicates his latest film Mario Martone. Sapienza wrote a great novel, “The art of pleasure”which publishers rejected and which was published years later; was … Partner for decades of the Italian director Francesco Maselli, she lived an era as a figure of Roman cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s, a friend of Moravia, Visconti, Zavattini, Elsa Morante…, a depressive, brilliant and feminist woman that Martone’s film already captures in her years of deep personal and economic crisis.

More than a biopic, Martone films the different processes of Goliarda Sapienza’s state of mind from her entry into prison (for stealing a friend’s jewelry), the extravagant relationship she establishes with some inmates and the “life on the outside” that followed with them, collected in a book she published under the title “The certainty of dubbio”. The film is the character, distant, very free and extreme, and it is also the actress who embodies her, Valerie Golinowho expresses herself fully to make people understand the intimate suffering of women and their strange but deep bond with these much younger women who live between the street and prison. Matilda de Angelis and Elodie interpret this other way of life in strong and fresh characters, although deeply unhappy just like Sapienza.

“Life Outside” can be either a glimpse into the chiaroscuro of an almost forgotten writer, or a hymn to an unexpected friendship or to elective affinities between people of difficult alloy but sharing the same alchemy. Also pIt can be a panoramic portrait of an era, the 80s, or a preamble to the feminine landscape of the following years.. In any case, Martone narrates with a certain disorder and leaves a strange and passionate story in his mixture of bittersweet bitterness in the life of an abandoned writer.