‘Misericordia’: Tallinn Review

Dir: Emma Dante. Italy. 2023. 95mins

Three sex workers live in a shack in a blighted settlement on the coast of Sicily – to call it a village dignifies it, as this is a refuse dump with a few huts cowering at its fringes. They see the very worst of a world that has all but forsaken them. But they have a maternal love for orphaned, intellectually disabled Arturo (Simone Zambelli), a mute and vulnerable child in the restless, reckless body of an eighteen-year-old man. The latest film from Emma Dante, Misericordia (which, like her previous film The Macaluso Sisters, was adapted from Dante’s own stage play) is a densely allegorical and furiously feminist work. It’s an unflinching, uncomfortable watch, a film that, with its hard-edged compassion and affinity with society’s discarded and rejected souls, has a kinship with the work of Pasolini.

A densely allegorical and furiously feminist work

Misericordia, which screens in competition in Tallinn following its premiere at the Rome Film Festival, is Dante’s third feature film. Her debut, A Street In Palermo, was awarded the Volpi Cup in Venice for actress Elena Cotta, while her acclaimed sophomore feature, The Macaluso Sisters, won the Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Dante’s profile as a playwright and the reputation of the source material should be a selling point for the picture domestically (Teodora will release the film in Italy this month). Elsewhere, the savagery of the material (the film starts with a femicide and a brutal beating) and the ‘holy fool’ device might limit the picture’s chances theatrically. This is, however, visceral, unsettling storytelling; a discomforting film that should get under the skin of audiences at further festivals.

The inhabitants of this grim little corner of Sicily – predominantly semi-clothed sex workers and a pack of feral children – have next to nothing. The home that Betta (Simona Malato) and Nuccia (Tiziana Cuticchio) share with Arturo has a roof, but damp seeps up through the floor at high tide, flooding the sad little living space with several inches of seawater (an early shot of Arturo’s mother’s lifeless body submerged in the ocean establishes the symbolic significance of water throughout the film).

When a new sex worker, Anna (Milena Catalano) arrives, she takes over Arturo’s room and soon shares the fiercely protective love that the other women feel for him. Others are less kind, however. The local pimp, known to the women as The Pig, a grotesque, one-eyed belligerent drunk, threatens to kill him. And Arturo understands enough to fear the man.

Despite its grimly unflinching gaze on extreme poverty, there’s a mythic quality to the story, which is emphasised by a score that seems to have roots that stretch back through generations of Italian folk music. The pimp and Arturo represent two polar extremes of masculinity. One is priapic, cruel and exploitative, driven by greed and lust, the other innocent, guileless and as vulnerable as an infant. And despite having experienced the very worst that the pimp and men like him can inflict, the film is a celebration of the love that the women can still find in their hearts for Arturo.