+Dormant Beauty (+Bella addormentata)
+Marco Bellocchio’s new film is a circumspect anatomy of mercy killing. In the four cases he dramatizes there are different balances between the public and the private interest. One inference is that on this issue there are such pronounced differences that humanitarianism cannot be served by a single template of admissible conduct.
The film begins with the most public case, based on the 2009 controversy in Italy when +Beppe Englaro decided to take his comatose daughter Eluana off her life support system. (A similar scandal roiled the US at the time.) There were angry demonstrations for and against this intervention. Here the Italian parliament is about to debate the right-wing government’s motion to prevent this euthanasia. The other cases lead from this public one to three more private ones.
A senator (Toni Servillo) resists his government’s pressure and resolves both to speak and to vote against the motion. Eschewing the options of absence or abstention, he plans to resign after the vote. In his speech he plans to confess that he himself ended his wife’s hopeless suffering, out of love for her.
His young daughter is among the demonstrators against Eluana’s release. She ignores her father’s cellphone calls out of anger, for she thinks she saw him smother her mother. The girl falls in quick love with a young man whose brother has run amok in opposition to the government’s and church’s ban on euthanasia. The wild brother calls the girl a nun for her sanctimonious mien. The “good” brother ends his new affair with the “nun” in order to care for his manic brother.
Another comatose young woman is being laboriously tended by a famous actress and staunch Catholic (+Isabelle Huppert). The son, an aspiring actor, is angry that their mother has sacrificed her career for her hopeless daughter’s care; when he acts, shutting off the life-support system, he is interrupted by their father. When the mother confesses to some undefined evil, she may be expressing her guilt for having perhaps wanted her daughter to die. As she tells the priest, she is always acting. Extending the daughter’s life has clearly frozen both the mother’s and the brother's.
His young daughter is among the demonstrators against Eluana’s release. She ignores her father’s cellphone calls out of anger, for she thinks she saw him smother her mother. The girl falls in quick love with a young man whose brother has run amok in opposition to the government’s and church’s ban on euthanasia. The wild brother calls the girl a nun for her sanctimonious mien. The “good” brother ends his new affair with the “nun” in order to care for his manic brother.
Another comatose young woman is being laboriously tended by a famous actress and staunch Catholic (+Isabelle Huppert). The son, an aspiring actor, is angry that their mother has sacrificed her career for her hopeless daughter’s care; when he acts, shutting off the life-support system, he is interrupted by their father. When the mother confesses to some undefined evil, she may be expressing her guilt for having perhaps wanted her daughter to die. As she tells the priest, she is always acting. Extending the daughter’s life has clearly frozen both the mother’s and the brother's.
In the fourth plot-line, doctors take different positions towards a beautiful young woman addict who has attempted suicide. The doctor in charge is eager to clear her out of the hospital, to be rid of her as soon as possible. But one doctor opts to save her. He sits by her bedside and when she awakens talks her back to life. His example discovers a scientist with greater respect for life than the government and church have shown.
Eluana’s natural death closes the parliamentary debate, saving the conscientious minister from making the speech that would have ended his career and perhaps led to his prosecution. His daughter tells him that since she has experienced love for the first time, she claims now to understand that what she took as smothering was actually her father’s loving caress. He gives her the confession he was going to read in parliament. This story Bellocchio leaves hanging. Will the girl revert to her earlier anger? Or will she see that the killing she did see was her father’s act of merciful love? She was right to see the killing but wouldn't it be even more right to see it as loving?
The title points us to several dormant or sleeping beauties here. Most obviously, they are the four comatose women. But perhaps there is an allegorical alternative: the beautiful love that sacrifices one’s own righteousness and safety to bring the beloved relief, whether in taking or in saving a life.
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