LITIGANTE: The obsolete family
“In our part of the world, ‘mother’ is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title disappears; the ex-son and the woman who could be called “mother” establish a new type of relationship. If they understand each other well, they continue to see each other often. If not, they separate. Nobody expects them to cling to each other, and that clinging is not an equivalent of love…”
The Island, Aldous Huxley
The scene that had the greatest visual resonance in the new film by Franco Lolli:, LITIGANTE was: Sylvia, the protagonist finally in a moment of intimacy with her son, and I say finally because throughout the film her motherhood is inconvenient and debatable. Initially I thought that this sequence posed a counterpoint to the initial sequence of Sylvia and Leticia, her mother suffering from cancer in an invasive resonance, as it is an accompanying scene, but the truth is that it is telling us about the same thing: the dominant of the establishment of the family order.
That shot brought to mind the iconic final scene of the 1985 film by German Wim Wenders “PARIS, TEXAS” in which Jane is reunited with her son and materializes a moving but at the same time raw return to the origin. Two badly assumed motherhoods with the additional “precariousness” of a father who is more of a shadow or a myth.
Maternity and paternity as a debatable bond is not only one of the signs left by the film, but from there comes the categorical annotation that its main actress Carolina Sanín makes: “They asked me for the news what message the film conveys. That would have to be said by the director, but in the name of my character — and also of my ideas — I say that we have to end the family”. This statement sounds like a cousin of Nietzsche’s controversial statement “God is dead”, but far from being a violent act, it represents a symbolic path towards the re-thinking of the evils that afflict the universe of LITIGANTE, that is, our reality. closest, which is where Lolli compulsively clings to in her works.
Community parenting is added to this affirmation as a path; I begin to be referred to the philosophical approaches of Aldous Huxley in his work “The Island”, a utopian book located in Pala (counterpoint of his previous work “A Brave New World”). The guidelines of his community draw on Buddhist ethics and primitive communism and promote initiatives such as stopping industrialization, community upbringing led by the elderly and a radical reform of the family system in general. There, children have an average of 20 homes or “families” made up of chosen young people, most of whom are: elderly; the blood relationship does not represent an exclusive bond and the choice of one’s environment is above all things: voluntary.
“We all belong — Susila explained — to a cam: a Mutual Adoption Club. All CAMs are made up of fifteen to twenty-five couples. Newly chosen boyfriends and girlfriends, veterans with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents… all members of the club adopt each other. Aside from our own blood relations, we have our share of proxy mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts, proxy brothers and sisters, toddlers and proxy teenagers.”
In Paris, Texas there is a strong predominance of biological fatherhood and motherhood, the child is torn from a beneficial nurturing environment to be returned to a complete stranger, but who finally gave birth to him; the family as a formality and a necessary evil. In Litigante, the definition of the family is put on the table, in line with Wenders’s film, as an instance of consciousness, therefore, of vigilance and although it softens with “comic relief” within the tragedy and moments of indisputable love between several of the characters, has something legitimate and constructive to say about the establishment of family order and its consequences. The dramatic charge is sustained by a mother-child / combative relationship from cradle to grave between Sylvia and her mother, Leticia.
An interaction plagued by shocks (which are felt given the circumstances) of cataclysmic magnitudes. Both women seek not only to overcome their shadow, but the shadow of others in them and in their failure they extend that shadow towards their own children. They have a complete failure in the two dimensions that motherhood includes for Huxley: the function and the relationship, which if they are mixed, can be absolutely unfavourable. For this reason, in Pala the biological mother does not necessarily assume the role (imposed socially and erroneously according to the Palanese) but on the contrary, she is supported by her community and always has the option of maintaining the dimension of relationship with her biological son. .
In our part of the world, “mother” is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title disappears; the ex-son and the woman who could be called “mother” establish a new type of relationship. If they understand each other well, they continue to see each other often. If not, they separate. Nobody expects them to cling to each other, and that clinging is not an equivalent of love, it is not considered something particularly worthwhile.
We openly know who the real father of the child is, his relationship with Sylvia and their biological son is a complete anomaly and this atypical bond suggests a breakdown of this family order, which plagues all of Sylvia’s family history in detrimental ways. The absence of the biological father, although for the child and his environment (mostly) represents an impact, this impact is nullified in the fiction by the scarce presence of the report, but which gives off a much healthier aroma than the other family unions. ? If socially this man would be the quintessential figure of “incorrectness.” I dare to assume that his father-son bond is flexible, but not fragile. In this bubble of fiction created by Lolli, not only clinging to his blood is worthy of merit.
On the utopian island of Pala, its inhabitants are taught to avoid what they call “the two-thirds of homemade and gratuitous punishment” in which it is totally legitimate for the child to escape from another of his 20 homes, in case he is unbearable. This does not represent a break in any family system, but an opening to the possibilities of spiritual and psychological development of the child.
“Take a sexually inept wage slave, a dissatisfied woman, two or (if you prefer) three little couch potatoes, pickle yourself a mixture of diluted Freudianism and Christianity; then hermetically packed in a four-room apartment and cooked for fifteen years in the juice.’ Our recipe is rather different. “Take twenty sexually satisfied couples, with their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal amounts; steep yourself in Tantric Buddhism, and boil indefinitely in an open pot, in the open air, over a lively flame of affection.”
These approaches may contain a strong ingredient of political and family incorrectness and that if most of our mothers heard us defending this, we would break their hearts but Franco Lolli subtly lets these thoughts cook in our heads, what happens to our models and systems of family? Are we endorsed by hereditary predestination? Does this represent a bond more compulsive than beneficial? In the Huxleyan way, not only children have a certain degree of freedom, but also parents have it based on their current aptitudes and interests. It not only frees children from parental inadequacies and injustices, but also frees their parents from unwanted slavery.
“That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my Aunt Mary moved in next door, I could never escape. — And your unfortunate parents could never escape from you. — That’s not true at all. My father used to elope through brandy, and my mother through her Anglicanism.”
If the family is a sentence, perhaps how the writer and lead actress Carolina Sanín decrees in strictness of integrity: the family should be eliminated.
Franco Lolli’s anthology of films are, for me, mental bodies, recurrent investigations of the emotional and physical effects of daily trauma that become diagnoses of the family as an institution and as a system. All of his films are limited to a narrative clarity and intentions, which is not only based on a determined realism but on a vernacular cinematographic language for all Colombians and Latin Americans. The entry of new natural actors into the history of Colombian cinema is a relief. Carolina Sanín, translates in her gaze a fracture of the soul, a cynical and tired gaze that embellishes even the most vulgar gestures. Leticia Gómez, powerful in her foolishness that glimpses the much-dreamed-of freedom.