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Rating: In a better world, "Love Me Licia," the epochal TV series directed by Mario Cavazzuti and launched in 1986, would be exhibited at MoMa and not labeled as trash.
Because trash it is, but it's trash like a John Waters film. Aware of the decay that lies at the core of its soul: it is a punk work of art, sick inside, out of time yet at the same time so strongly eighties, with decorations treated superficially yet colorful and LaChapellian, triumphing in nonsense that leaves one petrified.
An unimaginable nonsense emerging from intelligent and brilliant dialogues aimed at a ruthless and meticulous investigation of marital crisis and coexistence. An extreme and reconciling reflection on what love is, its difficulties, its end, and its beginning. Because love is a serious thing, not just flirtations: to love is to crash into a pole, it's also an inner investigation. Loving is wondering if you can continue to support someone who tells you they hate pasta with capers only to later resentfully admit they'd eat a big plate of it. Loving is giving enchantments, making it snow unexpectedly on Christmas night. Loving means walking to the horizon, to the sea, in a bathrobe to prove that "loving allows one to walk on water." But anger, repression is around the corner: Mirko cannot walk on water for Licia. The water, indeed, reaches up to his calf.
Married life is sweet and hard at the same time. Every human relationship has its difficulties, subdued blame, past traumas, the violence of memory. Thus, one travels through this nonsense that is part of our lives. Because our life is above all NONSENSE.
A journey to the end of the world that materializes in a visionary quality reminiscent of Terayama's films: blurry, Lynchian pink frames sealing nightmares tied to abandonment, intrusive fathers, daily challenges...
Licia forgets to cook breaded cutlets for Mirko, but magically they appear from behind her back, and the romantic dream materializes: hope is always there, but it can be in vain. As vain as the memory of a childhood fireplace, arduously built with effort in a Mizoguchi-like way, personally seeking out the chimney flue, pounding hard against the wall and piercing the love nest with a screwdriver. Licia refuses to call a technician or anyone with the expertise: the problem is tied to the couple and to save love, she fights hard.
Licia fights but at the same time wants her boyfriend to cut his ridiculous red tuft, and let's admit, she is right. He is crestfallen, he doesn't cut it. He passes it off as a surprise, a message for acceptance. No, dear ones: it's first and foremost chronic misunderstanding hidden under a pastel pink layer.
The couple is sweetness, but at the same time violence. "Love Me Licia" succeeds where many film authors have not managed to: perfectly describing the turbulent dynamics that occur between the sexes in a marital idyll, where however, it cannot be consummated because the incommunicability of bodies materializes in insatiable and senseless coexistence. You cannot have sex. It occurs calmly through words, as the terror of human contact remains intangible beneath the smiles. Jane Austen, with her niceties, couldn't manage to be so direct yet cryptic at the same time.
A visionary whirl, under acid, deeply sick, supported by music that would not look out of place in Japanese roman porno with filthy nuns in a convent. But let us remember: in "Love Me Licia," beneath the smiles and sweetness, there is repressed desire, the looming threat of rejection, mental sanity, collapse.
A fundamental work to watch without prejudice. Static and monolithic, there, suspended to tell us that our life is moral and immoral together, sweet and bitter, suffering and joyful. Seminal in its communication. To witness the state of "Love Me Licia" is Cristina D'Avena and it couldn’t have been anyone else but her as the lead actress of the saga: a childhood dream and nightmare, both the first crush and the friend, and the trauma of parents who want to watch the news. Because Licia is life and death encapsulated in a single body. Imprinted on film. Forever.
In our hearts.
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