At last the movie “La prima cosa bella” directed by Paolo Virzì is the choise of the italian commission to represent Italy at the Oscar Awards in 2011.
At the moment I do not know the title that will be given to it but I can translate as “The first beautiful thing”. It was also the title of an italian song of the latest ’60ies but in the context of the movie by Virzì, the first beautiful thing in one’s life is: the mother.
This director has always been famous for his honest and disillusioned attitude toward nowadays problems of italian society but his latest work is considered as an hommage to the relationship between mother and children across the latest forty years of our history.
Someone can say it could be a modern “Amarcord” (the Fellini’s masterpiece) but I can state that times are not the same.
Today in Italy women have so many problems to manage their lives, to find a job and reach a right distribution of duties in the housekeeping and children care.
Each day our newspapers and Tv news express the worry about the low growth of italian population (I think it would not be such a catastrophe) and that italian women do not have children during their young and appropriate age. On the other hand, there are so many female celebrities: actresses, journalists, sport players who feel obliged to say that, beyond their success, the most important goal in a woman’s life is motherhood. TV Advertising is full of famous female champions and “gold medals”who show how much they are happy being mothers more than being sportswomen.
In my opinion, this is some kind of propaganda that is going to make women think: “I does not matter who or what you are, the most important thing for a woman is motherhood”.
In fact it is not the same for italian male population. I’ve never seen on Tv a sportsman who states that the best thing in his own life is Fatherhood.
So, considering that in Italy it’s quite impossible for a pregnant woman to keep her job or turn back on her employment one year after her pregnancy, I cannot realize why every day there is a beautiful, rich and healthy “celeb” who tells us to become mothers. Maybe the final aim is to persuade italian women to leave behind their dreams of awareness and accept their natural destiny: being mothers and angels of the fireplace. This makes our society going back of about sixty or maybe seventy years, when good mothers and wives were expected to grow young and strong “italians” to achieve “a place in the sun”.