Una femmina (2022)

A young woman’s rebellion against her own family and against ‘ndrangheta: this puzzling land called Calabria’s own mafia.A must see for the crime-drama genre lovers: depicting a secluded village run by the nowadays arguabily most powerful criminal organization WW. Unglamorous, gritty, showing the sickness (and the weakness?) of this primitive world founded on ignorance, family, violence, silence and male chauvinism.Up there with the best on this subject (e.g. The less original/visionary but possibly more solid plotwise “Anime nere”) it’s obvious the craftsmanship and the care of the production (it’s the directors’ full length debut).Great cinematography, music and at least a dozen of powerful, hypnotic and even horror sequences and scenes. In particular the female protagonist has a unique and extremely expressive black-eyed gaze of defiance (which I guess she could have used a little less often).Indeed unfortunately paired with this visual poetry I found some problems with a lot of dialogues: too slow and static or weirdly delivered. Hard to tell if it’s the director’s or the actors’ fault. Still the result is that the level of tension falls and with it the suspension of disbelief necessary for the drama to work.Finally: no words can adeguately make justice of the marvellous final scene; I guess that watching it at the cinema (which I couldn’t do) must be a blast. Would be a 7 otherwise.