‘Clare’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Susanna Nicchiarelli. Italy, Belgium. 2022. 106 mins.  

Italian writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli has recently specialised in stylised biopics of eminent women – but it’s a long way from countercultural music icon Nico (Nico, 1988) to the mediaeval nun heroine of Clare (Chiara), premiering in Venice Competition. Clare, understandably given its subject, doesn’t quite have the brittle edge of the Nico film, but it’s a massive step up from Nicchiarelli’s 2020 Miss Marx, a staid affair which nevertheless awkwardly contended that political activist Eleanor Marx was a punk rocker at heart. There’s a certain degree of musical goofiness in Clare, but generally it’s a sober period drama that has more in common with the hagiographic likes of Rossellini’s The Flowers Of Saint Francis and Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon than it does – heaven be praised – with Paul Verhoeven’s convent romp Benedetta. Engaging and classily put together though it is, Clare seems unlikely to cast its blessing beyond Italy, although it should certainly have niche potential wherever there’s a strong Catholic audience. 

Niche potential wherever there’s a strong Catholic audience

Set over two decades in the early 13^th century, the film tells the story of Clare of Assisi, born Chiara Offreduccio, the daughter of a noble family who rejected worldly privilege to become a follower, then a peer, of Francis of Assisi, and who took a vow of absolute poverty as founder of an order of nuns, known in English as the Poor Clares. The film begins in 1211, when Clare (Margherita Mazzucco) and her friend Pacifica flee through a forest at night to reach Francis (Andrea Carpenzano). The two young women cut their hair, take a vow of devotion and join a convent where they become servants to the other nuns. But Clare rejects the idea of hierarchy, and founds a community along egalitarian lines where all are equals and none servants, and where Clare insists that she is not abbess, just one of the sisters (it’s also a community that welcomes women and men alike).

As time passes, Clare appears to display miraculous powers – first seen in her healing ability (although at one point, it’s just a matter of extracting a stone from a boy’s nose), later in more spectacular manifestations, as when she prevents her sister being forcibly dragged away by their brutal uncle. This is very much a film about women’s resistance to Patriarchy – which doesn’t come much more definitively upper-case P than it does in the form of the Vatican. Clare finds herself coming under the restrictive hand of Cardinal Ugolino (Luigi Lo Cascio), later to become Pope Gregory IX, over a matter that may seem esoteric to non-Catholic viewers, but is central here – her right to run a female community that has the ‘Privilege of Poverty’.

Another matter of doctrine involves the appropriateness or otherwise of translating holy texts from Latin into vernacular, for the benefit of less privileged believers -  and when Clare does that, it’s apparent that this is a breakthrough moment, not just for her but for Christianity. Language is central to a film whose dialogue is in the Umbrian volgare of the period, the same language in which St Francis wrote his poetry.

Holding it all together is a likeable, quietly commanding performance by Mazzucco – from HBO series My Brilliant Friend – who plays it muted, except in Clare’s moments of righteous rage. She also has a nice, borderline romantic rapport with Carpenzano’s Francis, but you can see the pair are at times as much foes as friends, and the power balance is such that you understand why the gentle, crypto-hippie saint eventually notes that Clare is the stronger of the two. 

Aside from the miracles and two stylised inserts showing Clare’s visions of herself as a saint and as the Virgin Mary, most of the film is in a sober mode of historical realism. DoP Chrystel Fournier finds variations in the dominant shades of monastic brown, with occasional borrowings from mediaeval and early Renaissance painting in the composition and chiaroscuro lighting. But there are also moments where the film bursts into song and dance, largely based around pastiche mediaeval music by Anonima Frottolisti – with a plainsong-style chant of Clare’s name in rich female harmonies, and dancing that cynics may find altogether too hey-nonny-no. There’s also a touch of disco pop over one of Clare’s jollier miracles, but because it comes right at the end of the film, it’s not as jarring as, say, Bruno Dumont’s Joan of Arc film Jeannette, which saw its young saint-to-be getting down to metal/EDM freakouts.