Oscar

Reading Oscar, text by Linda Dalisi, I have an image that became clear immediately, a memory… Kurosawa’s film Dreams. The first chapter begins with a child in the rain outside the house; the mother scolds him and tells him not to wander off, that when it rains like this, the foxes celebrate their marriage and whoever sees them may suffer something bad. The child, despite his mother’s warnings, wanders off and will see the foxes who in turn see him; then the child runs away and returns home, the mother drives him out and says she no longer wants him in the house because he went too far and saw too much, and that the foxes have arrived and left something for the child: a dagger so that the boy will kill himself. The mother advises him to beg the foxes and to save him from his desire to die. DIRECTOR’S NOTES Linda Dalisi’s Oscar has seen too much, she abandoned the house and everything she believed in to see, as she had never seen before, her city, her people falling apart. This seeing will no longer allow her to be the Oscar raised as a man by her father in service to the monarchy. Once Oscar sees, she breaks, she loses much of what she believed in, but above all she loses much of her identity. She becomes an unfinished being, and it is this incompleteness that moves me and takes me to something distant. Something that even today I struggle to remember and therefore to bring back to the heart; just like Oscar, I don’t remember when the change occurred in me, when I realized I was incomplete and inadequate, but this inadequacy is a powerful balm to trigger that creative process that I have always tried to keep and protect. A bow shoots the first arrow, maybe Cupid or maybe one of the Eastern bows so present in Kurosawa’s films, weapon or philosophy of life. I believe Linda’s Oscar is a creature used to giving, but never asking anything back. All the characters are unfinished, all the characters end without ever completing themselves, and they deliver themselves to death unfinished; and perhaps for this reason they wander like ghosts in a middle land that loses up and down, a land where gravitational force loses its power of attraction finally freeing souls from bodies and handing them over to Love, the only God that perhaps we have all more or less known. Only at the instant one feels love can we be born, and for this die, at the same moment the arrow strikes our chest. God mocks us. Antonio Latella -- About the events Oscar, daughter of a general staunchly loyal to the monarchy eager for male heirs, is raised as a soldier so that she will follow her father’s military career. Having become commander of the French royal guard, Oscar protects Marie Antoinette from the moment she arrives in France as the betrothed of the future Louis XVI, and becomes for the queen almost a guardian angel. The two women, of the same age, fall in love with the same man, the Swedish count Hans Axel von Fersen. But if both cannot live this love publicly — Marie Antoinette because she is Queen of France, Oscar because she was raised denying herself this possibility — the feeling of the young queen will be reciprocated until the end of her days, as later revealed by the intense secret correspondence between the two. The bond between Oscar and Marie Antoinette, based on the loyalty and dedication of the former, will begin to unravel when Oscar, observing the reality around her, puts on the scales of justice the poverty, social disparity and the conduct of the royal family and the nobility. The world witnesses the birth of a new thought, of voices rising in defense of the weak, of ideals and of civic, collective and individual redemption.