QUASI GRAZIA
Sardinian director Peter Marcias has done a little bit of everything. Since contributing an episode to the 2006 anthology, Bambini, he has produced shorts, documentaries, and features, as well as a couple of animations. He addressed LGBTQIA+ issues in Ma la Spagna non era cattolica?/But Wasn't Spain Catholic? (2007) and Silenzi e parole/ Silences and Words (2017) before exploring the art of documentary film-making in Uno sguardo alla Terra/A Look At the Earth (2018) and the right to work in Uomini in marcia/Marching People (2023).
On the feature front, he has followed his debut, Un attimo sospesi/A Suspended Moment (2008), with I bambini della sua vita/Children of Her Life (2010), Dimmi che destino avrò/My Destiny (2012), and La nostra quarantena/Our Quarantine (2015). But what makes him the perfect director for Quasi Grazia (2025), a tribute to the first Italian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the documentary triptych about female pioneers,
Liliana Cavani, una donna nel cinema/Liliana Cavani, A Woman in Cinema (2010), Tutte le storie di Piera/All of Piera's Stories (2013), and Nilde Iotti, il tempo delle donne/Nilde Iotti, The Time of Women (2020), which respectively profiled a provocative film-maker (Liliana Cavani), `the barefoot queen of the Italian stage (Piera Degli Esposti), and the first woman to become the president of the Chamber of Deputies (Nilde Iotti).
Rome, 1907 and Grazia Deledda (Irene Maiorino) is trying to start a new novel while husband Palmiro Madesani and her children are out. She is interrupted by the arrival of her mother, Francesca (Monica Demuru), who asks why she never returns to her Sardinian home of Nuoro. Frustrated at being interrupted and embarrassed at having nothing to offer her mother to eat, Grazia gets flustered and rushes into the garden. Francesca follows and they discuss how her parents had disapproved of her ambitions to become a writer, with her father, Giovanni, blaming her poor eyesight on the books upon which she had wasted so much time. When Grazia defends her choices, Francesca chides her for always thinking she was the most intelligent person in the room and tells her to show some respect.
Trying to settle at her typewriter, Grazia hears her brother, Santus (Stefano Mereu), calling from the garden and they embrace warmly. Again, she is ashamed at having no bread or milk, but he assures her he isn't hungry, as he sits at the kitchen table with their mother. He grumbles that his old-fashioned name marks him as an outsider on the mainland, but Francesca insists he should be proud of his Sardinian heritage. Catching Grazia alone, she urges her to pray for her brother, as his health is failing and she reiterates that family is more important than literature, even though Grazia avers that writing is her passion. Francesca snipes that she isn't an author, but a busybody who intrudes upon lives that are not her own. She orders Santus to return to Nuoro with her and, when Grazia implores him to stay and live on his own terms, Francesca intervenes and tells her daughter to enjoy living in her empty house and having the last word, as she will come to see that she is not always right about everything. Hurt that her mother refuses to recognise her achievement, Grazia explains that she had never returned to the Sardinia she has written about because nobody from the island had acknowledged her efforts to record life as she had witnessed it.
Left alone, Grazia hears the housekeeper returning from buying provisions. She asks about an embroidered dress that has been left on a table - one her mother had unpacked from her suitcase and Grazia had held to her face to breathe in the past - and the housekeeper explains that she had left it there while cleaning a cupboard.
The scene shifts to Stockholm in December 1927, as Grazia (Laura Morante) is escorted by Palmiro (Roberto De Francesco) to collect her Nobel Prize. She is interviewed by Irishman Richard Wilson (Jack McAvoy), who notes that they are both exiles from their native islands. She recalls the day she found some poems that her father had written and decided that she would like to write. At 13, she had penned her first story and she had experienced a sense of freedom that encouraged her to continue, in spite of parental disapproval. She was supported, however, by her tutor, Andrea Pirodda (Matteo Tedde), who is seen reading the letters in which Grazia had confided her feelings during her early years on the mainland.
Finding a quiet place to sit, Grazia is joined by the spirit of her mother, who accuses her of arrogance in thinking that she should be congratulated on her award. She curses that she hadn't knocked her sense of superiority out of her as a child, but then takes credit for being the driving force behind Grazia's desire to write and escape, as every artist needs a foe to rebel against. Grazia recalls Andrea's last letter, in which he had asked her not to write again because he had been hurt by the news she had married Palmiro, who was then attached to the Ministry of Fance in Cagliari. With his waxed moustache and stiff manner, he seems pompous. But Grazia relies on him and thanks him for being her rock in the run up to receiving the prize and having to give two speeches. He acclaims her the most famous woman writer in the world, a remark that echoes Wilson's question about Grazia's familiarity with the works of Selma Lagerlöf, the Swede who had become the first female Nobel laureate in 1909.
The final sequence is set in Rome in 1935, as Grazia (Ivana Monti) is accompanied to hospital by her niece, Mirella (Gala Zohar Martinucci). She undergoes X-rays to determine the extent to which her breast cancer has spread and thinks of her mother and brother, while waiting to see her doctor (Roberto Citran). She compliments a small boy on reading a book and chats to a nun who checks she's okay, while thinking back about her mother and Santus. When the professor breaks the news to Mirella that Grazia's condition is incurable, she refuses to believe him and vows to seek a second opinion in Germany or Switzerland. He informs her that Il Duce had checked on her aunt's condition and promises to do everything to ensure she doesn't suffer. Meanwhile, Grazia wanders the grounds with her walking stick and ponders her past. As they prepare to leave, she tells Mirella that she will treat her new heroine to a miraculous cure, as she intends to finish the semi-autobiographical La chiesa della solitudine/The Church of Solitude. Francesca wanders up to her and offers a smile of reassurance that makes Grazia cry.