Rating 6/10
I found it hard to enjoy the film much. It was not easy to be sympathetic to the protagonist. She moped around and was rather dull. I know Antonia's husband had just died and she then discovered his dread dark secret, but even so she did not provide a strong core for the film to be structured around. The film contrasted the coldness and sterility of her life (didn't she have any friends?), with the warmth of her dead husband's lover and his circle of friends. The movie didn't give any convincing reason why she wanted to insert herself into her dead husband's secret life, or why his lover and circle of friends wanted her in their lives. Then when she didn't need them any more, she moved on.
Another difficulty was that I had trouble deciding what the film was trying to say. I might could describe it as a 'slice of life', but that is something of a cop-out unless you can define what particular slice of life the film is trying to show. Otherwise, you might just as well have a camera following some random family going about its normal business. Oh yes, we do and it's called reality TV. And no-one has ever accused reality TV of having any pretensions of having any intellectual or artistic value.
I thought for a while that the main theme was the importance of honesty and the cost of keeping secrets. But then Antonia had her own secret that she was quite happy keeping, for no good reason that I could see. I ended with the conclusion that the film is about the widow coming to terms with her husband's death. But does that mean that the husband's homosexual side was nothing but a plot device of the worse possible thing that a wife could find out about her husband?
That brings me to the question of why is the film titled "Ignorant fairies"? Sure, it describes a particular plot device and it refers to the fact that the lover and many of his friends were gay. But does fairy have the same negative connotation in Italian as English? And why ignorant? If anything, it was Antonia who was ignorant because of her unawareness of her husband's secret life.
By the end of the film I was left feeling vaguely uneasy about the intentions of the director and the subtext of the film.
I found it hard to enjoy the film much. It was not easy to be sympathetic to the protagonist. She moped around and was rather dull. I know Antonia's husband had just died and she then discovered his dread dark secret, but even so she did not provide a strong core for the film to be structured around. The film contrasted the coldness and sterility of her life (didn't she have any friends?), with the warmth of her dead husband's lover and his circle of friends. The movie didn't give any convincing reason why she wanted to insert herself into her dead husband's secret life, or why his lover and circle of friends wanted her in their lives. Then when she didn't need them any more, she moved on.
Another difficulty was that I had trouble deciding what the film was trying to say. I might could describe it as a 'slice of life', but that is something of a cop-out unless you can define what particular slice of life the film is trying to show. Otherwise, you might just as well have a camera following some random family going about its normal business. Oh yes, we do and it's called reality TV. And no-one has ever accused reality TV of having any pretensions of having any intellectual or artistic value.
I thought for a while that the main theme was the importance of honesty and the cost of keeping secrets. But then Antonia had her own secret that she was quite happy keeping, for no good reason that I could see. I ended with the conclusion that the film is about the widow coming to terms with her husband's death. But does that mean that the husband's homosexual side was nothing but a plot device of the worse possible thing that a wife could find out about her husband?
That brings me to the question of why is the film titled "Ignorant fairies"? Sure, it describes a particular plot device and it refers to the fact that the lover and many of his friends were gay. But does fairy have the same negative connotation in Italian as English? And why ignorant? If anything, it was Antonia who was ignorant because of her unawareness of her husband's secret life.
By the end of the film I was left feeling vaguely uneasy about the intentions of the director and the subtext of the film.