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.
Born in 1924, with a life forged in Italian anti-fascism, religious nonconformity, and artistic radicalism, Sapienza’s turbulent existence had the feel of a one-person prison fight itself, even if her name is not immediately recognizable to international audiences.
The film’s auteur — making his third entry in the Cannes competition, with seven appearances in Venice’s — may also require a bit of explanation for curious, but unfamiliar, viewers. Reviewing his handsome and intellectually rich movies at those festivals, Anglophone critics have often been baffled by Martone, a director who encapsulates Italian cinema’s localism (or, its relevance to the nation’s complexly intertwined political, religious and regional issues), which are cathartic for domestic viewers and obscure to others.
Born in Naples, his relevance also comes from his role as a precursor to an acclaimed wave of directors (among them: Sorrentino, Marcello, and Garrone) grittily evoking the country’s troubled and resilient South. Yet “Fuori” stands apart as one of the filmmaker’s most vibrant and accessible works so far, able to emphasize the story of a powerful and beautiful older woman — with flecks of a classic melodrama or the “woman’s picture” — beyond the heritage concerns of Sapienza’s role in Italian letters.
To make one more comparison — we promise! — bridging the Italian and Anglophone cultural spheres, think of “Fuori” as a sister to recent 20th century literary biopics such as “Shirley,” “Iris,” or “Sylvia,” all of which oddly have forename-derived titles. Books will hopefully be sold at McNally Jackson, and reputations further burnished and solidified, showing again the vital connection between authors’ personal troubles and the power of literature and self-expression to neutralize them.
The film begins in 1980, as Goliarda is booked into the Rome women’s prison Rebibbia; the writer’s life story and her triggers for inspiration were unique even amongst the aforementioned company. But “Fuori” is essentially a story of the effects of incarceration, and the unshakeable solidarity that can grow in such environments (and bloom further on the “outside”).
With her social and economic status shaken after separating from the neorealist filmmaker Francesco Maselli, Goliarda steals some jewelry from the female host of a party who humiliates her, an act of revenge with horrible repercussions. After the fleeced possessions are spotted by the latter’s housekeeper at a local market, Goliarda is thrown in the clink for a short sentence, the latest chapter in a struggle that saw previous institutionalizations (plus, failures in her attempts to be published and also act in films).
Goliarda falls in socially with the much younger Roberta (Matilda de Angelis) and Barbara (the Italian pop star Elodie). Their connection is somewhat amorous and emotionally intimate, but never fully sexual, as she acts as a “mother superior” to this flock. In return for her guidance and inspiration, she recovers her own youthful vitality (and, as Roberta accuses her, some authentic material for her writing). Too often, some of the harsher realities of incarceration appear glossed over, in a space that’s sometimes awkwardly visualized as more of a group home for wayward bohemians and vagabonds. Later, they reunite in Barbara’s new beauty shop (run, to the danger of potential re-imprisonment, by her gangster boyfriend), and re-evoke the old times with a group shower, erotically depicted by Martone such that he’d risk a short sentence in the popular online meme of “horny jail.”
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.
Among Anglophone musical genres (corresponding to their roles on opposite sides of WW2), post-war Japan loved jazz, while Italy had a particular affinity for progressive rock. Appropriate for its urban bohemian milieu, Martone throws plenty of Robert Wyatt on the film’s soundtrack, one number most notably cut to a joyriding scene, as the old British socialist “sing-raps” not unlike Michael Stipe on “It’s the End of The World as We Know It” (unlike a few attendees in this year’s Cannes screenings, I didn’t immediately open Shazam.)
Politics, autofiction, progressive rock, jail — that’s the “Fuori” mindset.
Grade: B
“Fuori” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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