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Rating: La pazza gioia is the latest film by Paolo Virzì. I went to see it with the idea that it was about the misadventures of two women escaping from a mental health facility, and in some ways it is, but by the end of the film, I found myself reflecting that it is a film about love.
As the plot unfolds, the purest and truest feelings emerge, those we have stopped looking at straight in the eye over time.
Beatrice (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is a snobbish, talkative, bipolar woman hosted in a therapeutic community where she meets a new guest, Donatella (Micaela Ramazzotti), who suffers from depression and is tormented by having to give her son up for adoption.
It will be revealed that the two women, although coming from diametrically opposite environments, have been cornered by the meanness of the (dis)human beings they have encountered in their lives.
On one hand, Beatrice has lived in an environment of extreme wealth and married a rising lawyer of the Berlusconi era, only to fall madly in love with a con artist who makes her squander the family fortune. On the other hand, Donatella grew up with an inept and petty father who barely makes it as a failed pianist, and a totally unaffectionate mother. She works as a promo girl in a nightclub and falls in love with the owner, by whom she becomes pregnant. Since he refuses to acknowledge the child, Donatella, fired and unable to rely on her family, is forced to place the baby in a foster home.
Both, seizing a moment of distraction on the part of the health workers, escape together and decide to pursue their respective obsessions. At this point, they collide with the so-called normal people. It is then that they realize they are both too fragile to withstand the world's meanness on their own and understand that they can only survive if they unite their strengths.
The screenplay is co-written by Virzì and Francesca Archibugi, and the partnership proves successful, especially when discussing mental illness without falling into the usual clichés.
Both Ramazzotti and Bruni Tedeschi are extraordinary, never banal, and perfectly centered in their roles. They are the antithesis of each other but complementary.
The quote: “Are you mad?” – “Eh, according to some expert opinions, it seems so…”
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