Matteo Garrone - Primo Amore: Love For Disease

Primo Amore: Love For Disease

In Primo Amore, the film released two years after L'imbalsamatore, the filmmaker continues to explore obsessive passions and fatal attractions. As in L'imbalsamatore, the viewer is invited from the very beginning to enter the realm of passions, in this instance, between two heterosexual people, Vittorio (Vitaliano Trevisan) and Sonia (Michela Cescon). The film is based on a book-confession entitled Il cacciatore di anoressiche, in which the author, Marco Mariolini, confesses to the murder of a young woman, Monica Cal. Found guilty of the crime committed in 1998, Mariolini describes in his book published a year prior to his crime in 1997, the origins of his obsession for anorexic women. As he explains in his book, pathological behavior led him to fall in love with an anorexic woman, Monica Cal. After an initial relationship, Monica left him to escape from his cruelty, but eventually fell into his trap again and, with her death, ended Mariolinis pathological obsession.

Garrone's film tells the story of Vittorio and Sonia, a goldsmith and a store assistant, and the abusive relationship they develop when they move in together. This is an obsessive and pathological relationship because it is based on Vittorios demands to that Sonia lose weight so he can fully appreciate (and love) her. Sonia at first accepts his requests as if she has to please him to be appreciated by him. She then realizes that he is depriving her of her own life and ultimately finds the strength to end this oppression. In Garrone's cinematic account of Vittorios tragic obsession, the viewer is invited to enter into a forbidden space: that of a most secret desire and obsession: an uncontrollable and totalitarian love or the desire to love so deeply one owns the beloveds mind and body. In this space, as in L'imbalsamatore, viewers are once again left to wonder about the emotions evoked by Garrone's images and by their own responses to a narrative that shows how controlling anothers mind and body can be mistaken as an act of love.

In an intriguing reading, Maria Vittoria and Paola Golinelli discuss Primo Amore from a psychological perspective, emphasizing the effects that Garrone's film produces on the audience. Although anorexia, they claim, remains as much unknown as it is painful, the film succeeds in letting us witness the struggle and the emotional involvement of the two characters through painful images that speak of deprivation and physical as well as psychological abuse. In adapting Primo Amore from the book based on the actual story of its author, a killer, Garrone inevitably refers to several medical pathologiesanorexia, mental illnesses in order to speak metaphorically. As he explains in the last section of Non solo Gomorra, the film was meant to address the instabilities and insecurities of two people who search for a normal life together by means of what they believe is love. Vitaliano Trevisan, a renowned writer from Vicenza, plays the protagonist Vittorio. The filmmaker decided to cast Trevisan as the films protagonist mostly because of the writers introspective and somewhat mysterious personality. This element, together with the choice to shoot the film in Trevisans native town furthers the possibility of Garrone creating a character in a more realistic, authentic way. The drastic loss of weight endured by the actress Michela Cescon during the films shooting also contributes to the true-to-life portrayal of a dramatic, tragic obsession and its dangerous outcome. Most interestingly, with this film, Garrone moves from the familiar space of Rome seen in previous films to the northern province of Vicenza to show the dull, isolated landscapes that surround the characters. In this space, the filmmaker highlights the couples struggle to adapt to a normal life. Furthermore, the filmmakers curiosity about the real drama of a sick man, Mariolini and his obsessive desires for slim, even skeletal and emaciated women, gives him the opportunity of reflecting on Italy. If on the surface Italy appears a shining collection of artistic beauty and richness, of economic growth and prosperity, using a different lens, reveals a country consumed by violence, from racial intolerance to political and social divisions based on geographical borders. The horrific obsession between Vittorio and Sonia in Primo Amore suggests Italys darkest side, that characterized by violence and undisclosed corruption, unruly passions and dangerous obsessions which are responsible for spreading insecurity, instability, and loneliness. L'imbalsamatore followed a similar artistic path, as it was loosely based on a real event that occurred in Italy. In it, Garrone expressed his concerns about social issues that revolve around human interaction and values and examined the fragile boundaries between good and evil.

Garrone's peculiar vision of obsessive emotions uncovers a fascination that the filmmaker has with the human body. Rather than focusing on the physical aspects that denote beautygenerally employed by male filmmakers to address femininity and sexualityin Primo Amore, Garrone privileges the sinister consequences of an obsession that derives from looking at a human body. Determined to shape Sonias body in order to make of her the perfect ideal of feminine beauty, Vittorio maintains an almost diabolic control over her body and mind. Sonia agrees to lose weight, as if this were the ultimate proof that love exists between her and Vittorio because of her sacrifice in letting him appropriate her body. Vittorios bleak, obsessive look, while staring at Sonia when he first sees her in the bar at the bus station, projects his uncontrollable desire for her body. During their first conversation, Vittorios prevailing power over her is well illustrated when he succeeds in convincing her to stay in the bar. While in the bar, despite Sonias initial uneasiness caused by Vittorios disappointment in noticing Sonias body, not as thin as he was expecting, she is nonetheless attracted to his charismatic persona. The life they start together is based on a co-dependence Vittorio depends on Sonias anorexia because only by molding her body, can he fulfill his obsessions. Sonias life depends on Vittorios desires to feel she is fully accepted, resulting in a sinister game of attraction, destruction and self-destruction. Vittorios pathological glances at her silhouette contain a wide range of emotions whenever he is confronted with the overwhelming forces that push him to take over Sonia. Close-ups of Vittorio and Sonias face are often used in scenes when the narrative demands an emotional involvement on the part of viewers.

Italian writer Italo Moscati suggests that Vittorio's obsession comes from wanting to deprive Sonia of all feelings, as if she is a metaphor for today's Italian society which has become, on the surface, wealthy, gaining weight and getting comfortable with its excessive futile commodities. This fascinating reading adds to the complexity of this fatal attraction, especially since it is based on a true story. It points to another significant aspect of the film: the symbolism given the numbness and human isolation often found in the lifestyle of the northern provinces. As mentioned by Garrone in an interview, the depiction of the suburban Vicenza in Primo Amore gives him the ideal situation to depict a relationship between a man and a woman in which the geographical space becomes a metaphor for loneliness and psychological instability.

Similarly, the space embodied by the two towns chosen for L'imbalsamatore, Caserta (near Naples) and Cremona, reinforces the importance the filmmaker gives to space. In this film, the journey the three characters take in the second half of the film brings them from the southern town of Caserta to the northern province of Cremona. Like Vicenza in Primo Amore, these towns in L'imbalsamatore symbolize more than a geographical space. The cinematography employed by Garrone in depicting the different landscapes of the two towns, using sunny and well-lit scenes in the southern town and rainy and dim ones in the northern one, clearly suggests an inner division, a separation between spaces that is more than visual, symbolizing the social and cultural fracture between the industrial North and the agrarian South. Once again, Garrone decides to let the landscape, its regional variety and cultural diversity, speak by itself with long shots that offer the viewer an imagery absorbed with symbolic significance.

Desolate scenery functions as a mirror of the lonely and at times dull life that both Sonia and Vittorio experience. Since their first encounter in the bar at the bus station, the viewer realizes that women's and mens different mannerisms and roles in communicating symbolize a relationship based on a hierarchy. Vittorio is the dominant figure, demanding attention and assertive to the point that Sonia, once she becomes emotionally involved in this relationship, moves in with him. Sonia is not only submissive to his desires; her submission is the result of loneliness and a desire to be with someone. From the moment Sonia moves in with Vittorio, the couple starts playing out a masochistic and at times horrific relationship in which the man psychologically, more than physically, dominates the woman. As mentioned earlier, controlling anothers body by having her lose weight is for Vittorio the acknowledgment of the power he has over Sonia. Is this obsession a distorted, limited vision of love? Does brutality triumph? The film does not provide an answer as it leaves the viewer to interpret through the images the strange dynamics developed between the two.

Gold is at the core of this film in the characterization of Vittorio as a goldsmith, another reminder of a metaphor that functions to speak of obsessions in terms of a desire for shining, aesthetically perfect beauty more than for emotional and profound connection. Vittorios need to mold Sonias body also signifies his reaching a fulfillment, almost a spiritual enrichment that only an ideal of beauty with a body that becomes a perfect embellishment of a self can give. A body that can be shaped and adjusted according to his own desires: this is the ultimate manifestation of love that Sonias body symbolizes for Vittorio. In conclusion, Vittorio and Sonia present the different ways in which an obsession can be manifested and even mistaken for love: it can become a tool through which one possesses the other, as if by metaphorically eating the beloved, one can fulfill his/her desires to love. There is no joy or happiness in the relationship developed between Sonia and Vittorio, and death seems to be the ultimate way to consummate their mutual dependence. As for Vittorio, prevailing over Sonia is, in his pathological state, the only way he can experience what he feels love is but, at the end, Sonia finds the strength to rebel and put an end to her (and his) misery. In the end, Sonias reaction to Vittorio s dominance adds a new component to the complexity of the character: her female agency. By hitting Vittorio and making him unconscious and thus helpless, Sonia, a female body and mind controlled by male dominance, evolves from being a property, an object to mold, to an active pursuer of life. Vittorio and Sonia lose touch with the surrounding reality because they are so preoccupied with their own relationship. Primo Amore therefore succeeds in reveals the dangerous and distraught consequences of love when confronted with uncontrollable obsessions.