La pazza gioia

At first you wonder what a woman like Beatrice Morandelli Valdirana is doing in the Villa Biondi, an institution for women with mental health problems in the Tuscan countryside. She claims to be a Countess, rich, well-connected and knowledgeable. A little bit of a busybody maybe, talkative, inquisitive and demanding but clearly intelligent. It's not long however before you're wondering what on earth they are thinking letting her out to do some part-time work at a plant nursery. Are they mad?

The difference is that Beatrice seems to have hit it off with a new 'inmate', Donatella Morelli, who has been brought in after a suicide attempt. Unlike Beatrice, Donatella is silent, withdrawn and nervous, and has no social connections and only one number on her phone. When the mini bus picking them up from the nursery is late one day, the two women decide to make their own way back; the long way, with a few amusing diversions along the way.

With two inmates from a mental health institution on the loose, you might think La Pazza Gioia (Like Crazy) is going to be something along the lines of 'The Dream Team' meets 'Thelma and Louise', and indeed the film plays up the crazy angle for all it's worth, with plenty of broad humour to be had in their encounters along the road and their chases from the authorities. Principally however, La Pazza Gioia is an actor's game, and Paolo Virzi is working with two of the best here, giving them great material to work with.

Beatrice is a gift of a role for Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who has a successful career as an actor in France and Italy and has drawn on her own aristocratic background as the writer/director of 'Il est plus facile pour un chameau...' and 'Un château en Italie'. Give her broad and she'll expand to fill the role, demonstrating the full range of her abilities from comedy to drama, from melodrama to more subtle exchanges and sensitivities. The dynamic is stretched further in the contrasting role offered to Micaela Ramazzotti as Donatella, who is searching for her son who has been taken away from her and into care. This gives the film a little more dramatic poignancy than the premise might suggest.

More then than just being a buddy comedy or a vehicle for two great actors, it's the fact that there are two great performers in these roles that gives the film the necessary balance between comedy and more serious matters that are raised. La Pazza Gioia looks at some of the problems faced by women and how those troubles are not recognised or taken seriously in the no-nonsense modern world. It's enough to drive anyone crazy.

Whenever I review a foreign language film, I fully realize many people won't bother watching the picture because it's not in English. This is a shame, as many of the better films I have seen have been in a variety of languages and with "Like Crazy", you'd be missing a very good movie.

The story begins in a psychiatric institution in Italy. Beatrice (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is a patient, though she won't admit this to anyone…even herself. In her distorted mind, she is a countess… and the old mansion used as a hospital was donated by her to treat these unfortunate people! So, while at times Beatrice looks and seems very normal, she is severely deluded and self-absorbed. When a new resident arrives, Beatrice decides to make Donatella (Micaela Ramazzotti) her own personal project. After all, she is a rich, benevolent lady and helping the unfortunates is her life! So how, exactly, does she 'help'? Yep…she orchestrates an escape and soon the oddly matched pair are out on a joy ride…complete with stolen car.

At this point in the movie, Paolo Virzi (who wrote and directed the picture) could have chosen to make the film a kooky comedy, like "Crazy People" or "The Couch Trip"…which is what you might expect with a Hollywood film. Fortunately, "Like Crazy" does not go there but manages to be rather poignant as well as realistic. You learn more about Beatrice and Donatella and their lives outside the institution but there are no magic solutions to their problems. After all, they are indeed very ill and mental illness isn't particularly funny…and is often quite tragic. Now this is not to say that ultimately this is a depressing or tragic film…and it manages to say quite a bit while still being believable and compelling.

To define madness starts by defining normalcy. 'La pazza gioia' (the English title is 'Like Crazy'), the film written and directed by Paolo Virzì in 2016 has as main heroines two women hospitalized in a sanatorium for psychiatric diseases. In general, films of this kind are characterized by an oppressive and depressing atmosphere, same as life in this kind of institutions is known to be. Not 'La pazza gioia'. To start with, the film present a candid and sympathetic point of view towards what is happening in the villa in Tuscany where the heroines are hospitalized. The story has rhythm and humor. As we get to know the two women, we begin to understand the motivations of their actions, from escaping from the closed (or semi-closed) premises they are constrained to the past with the actions that brought them into the situation of being psychiatric patients. Up to a point, the female 'road movie' formula with two women running away from their own destiny quite faithfully respects the formula in the best known classic original 'Thelma & Louise', with the characters dominating the film here as well, largely due to outstanding acting. The result is original and exciting.

At first glance, the two women are very different from each other. Beatrice Morandini (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) assumes aristocratic manners and creates an imaginary world around her own person, a world in which she is the rich and the dominant one. Donatella Morelli (Micaela Ramazzotti) is closed in herself, she always seems in danger of self-harming, obviously hiding tremendous trauma. One is chic and neat even when her dresses fall badly, the other neglects herself. One is blonde, the other is brunette. The institution in which they are hospitalized seems liberal, tolerant, trying to help. Their running away is not the result of despair but rather the pursuit of a promordial instinct of the desire for freedom. However, the outside world turns out to be much more cruel than the one in the constrained space from which they had fled. Confronting the reality and the personal histories of each of them, which are gradually revealed to us, is more traumatic than the treatment inside. It would be tragic if everything wasn't approached in a comic register which is, well ... crazy. Undoubtedly, this is the right word.

The roles of lunatics often provide opportunities for remarkable acting performances, but it seems to me that in this film the two actresses have achieved something extraordinary. These are two roles of this kind, but the two actresses not only do not eclipse each other, but complement each other wonderfully in a relationship in which their traumas and despairs come together and generate emotion without falling into pathos or cheap melodrama. However, the film also features numerous scenes in which the comic of situations and characters offers opportunities for healthy laughter. The sunny and picturesque landscape of Tuscany that we know from so many films with touristic aromas provides the background of a corrupt and ruthless world, where the only chance and last refuge of the heroines is the psychiatric institution from which they fled. Paolo Virzì manages with 'La pazza gioia' a remarkable performance - a 'good feeling' movie about madness and despair.

One of the key players of current Italian cinema, Paolo Virzì's newest offering LIKE CRAZY brings audience to the sun-drenched Toscana, where nestles a home for the mentally unstable (a picturesque mise-en-scène peppered with creditable employees and patients), there we meet Beatrice (Tedeschi), a motormouth screwball who can compulsively babble on and on as long as she can find an audience, and Donatella (Ramazzotti, Ms. Virzì in real life), a diffident introvert masked by her tattoo-embroidered body and punk appearance, who is ailed by depression and a tendency of violence.

Beatrice befriends the newly arrived Donatella, who becomes the newest recipient of her predominantly one-sided pattering, but Beatrice also reciprocally brings a pint of energy into Donatella's colorless life, for the clinical aspect, they transmit salutary influences on each other, a defining vindication of the existence of such communal facilities. One day, during a field day, when their pick-up is late, Beatrice impulsively dashes to a bus with Donatella tagging along, against others' opposition, hence the duo embarks on a journey fueled by spontaneous decisions and devil-might-care drollness, if not wholly realistic, a similar mode of Ridley Scott's THELMA AND LOUSIE (1991) except that there will be no place for body count and radical feminist manifesto to temper Virzì's well wrought combo of farce and drama.

The onus of farcical bombast is aptly falls upon the shoulders of Ms. Tedeschi, and it is pretty much up her alley to conjure up an inexorably flamboyant character takes no prisoners in her maniacal loquacity, verbally challenges, needles, assaults everyone she meets or around her, which sometimes feels too specific for an Italian-speaking context, her "crazyness" is unequivocally the driven force of the duo's on-the-run caper, but at moments when sensibility and sagacity is required, e.g. during the conversation with the foster parents of Donatella's son, she can also function as a qualified interlocutor who is not self-absorbed and eloquent enough to make her points clear. Yes, Donatella has a toddler son which she has to forsake due to her unwell conditions, and it is through Donatella's back-story, where clichéd scenario of a woman buffeted by unworthy parents, atrocious sleazes and a traumatic severance between a mother and her son hits all the notes, life renders her completely helpless and disillusioned, but even so, miraculously, buoyed up by Beatrice's undimmed vivacity and "craziness", eventually Donatello procures a glimpse of hope in the faintly mawkish encounter with her unwitting tot, to predictably affix a non-confrontational ending to this ostensibly rebellious yarn against bureaucracy, authority, patriarchy and the Establishment.

Both actresses register impressive performances albeit the script isn't always coruscating with golden ideas, Tedeschi dominates in her unfettered oomph and gumption while Ramazzoti diametrically sears in her distressed transmogrification, but it is the former's all-out flair entrances audience, not just being a brazen laughing-stock, underneath Beatrice's grandiloquent veneer, there lies a dysfunctional human being dragged into neurosis and illusion through her own dopiness and those inimical exterior forces, from this regard, both are nevertheless victims on similar grounds, but ultimately, it seems, Virzì consciously cops out to unleash its sociological critique and instead, sends a more anodyne message of a circular conclusion without disturbing the status quo.

"A joyful madness" would have been a better translation for the international market. Such a surprisingly good film. Well, not entirely surprising because Paolo Virzì, from Tuscany, currently one of Italy's best directors, his movies always centred around interesting, well defined characters, masterfully mixing comedy and drama, in this case with heart breaking results. It helps that this screenplay has been written together with talented screenwriter and director Francesca Archibugi who, amongst other things, in 1990 directed Italian movie icon Marcello Mastroianni in the drama "Verso sera" (Towards Evening). Her contribution to this film must be acknowledged. The two leading actresses are excellent. Micaela Ramazzotti as the desperate mother who, amongst all sort of troubles, tries to get back in contact with her only son. Even better is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who is absolutely amazing as Donatella, the rich countess who struggles to cope with her mental disorders but who takes the younger Beatrice under her wing. When they run away from the psychiatric facility they are placed in by the authorities (perfectly depicted in typical human but caothic way) their foolish adventure begin. Such an intense, moving, touching film. Highly recommended.