Like Crazy

The original Italian title translates as The Crazy One, which initiates the first question: to which of the two runaway psychiatric institute inmates does the title refer? Is it the yapping name-dropping aristocratic blonde beauty Beatrice or the vulnerable punk with a past Donatella?

As is common in the Cuckoo’s Nest genre, the narrative reverses our expectations when we find characters outside the institution are at least as loony as those within. Here Beatrice’s ex-husband lawyer and Donatella’s mother match the heroines in eccentricity and perversity. At first reading the film sensibly treats the illnesses of depression and manic exhilaration with empathy. On that theme alone the film stands solid and humane.

But it also operates on two broader levels. One is the celebration of a free individualism against restrictive conventions of behaviour. 

In their separate worlds both heroines violate what’s expected of them. Beatrice insists on living large and free, snooping through forbidden files, playing doctor, luxuriating in her ex-husband’s verboten estate, deluding herself that her ruinous pimp loves her. Donatella only wants to keep her baby son, or to have his other-familied father see him, or to give the baby a day of adventure outside The Home. Both women are charged with madness for their emotional needs. Their freedom threatens others. 

When Donatella meets her little son on the beach she is finally allowed to express herself. The boy’s adoptive parents check their fears and let her frolic with him for a while. Their liberalism is quickly denoted by their second adoptive child, a little black girl. When Donatella and her son swim underwater together she can wash away their earlier submersion. Then in despair she tried to drown them together. With this new contentment Donatella on her own returns to the home to be cured. 

An institution is a dramatic setting for this theme. Its values are control, suppression of the wild and spontaneous, conformity. The home here is rather easy, given the cinematic tradition. There’s no Nurse Ratchit and the physical restraint and electroshock are in outside institutions, not here. 

Indeed the happy ending has both women return for treatment instead of being dispatched to harsher alternatives. In the end, untrammelled individualism proves destructive. Social order requires restraint, which sometimes needs to be initiated from without if it’s not working within. 
      In the Italian context the film also plays that tension out on the political level. Italians constantly face the electoral choice between liberty and repression, especially in the context of its Fascist past. The relatively gentle institution here represents a government of order that stops short of that historic extreme, but it is still a system of restraint. In this respect the film addresses the political tension beyond Italy, across Europe and into America. Broadly, today the repressive Right promotes the conformism of nationalism and white superiority, driving the modern experiment of liberalism to retreat.