Lessons in Love

It takes courage, today, to talk about feelings, or about the enchantment of a pure, authentic love and of “poor and simple” souls (as the title of one of Ortese’s novels says). In a language that oscillates between literary Italian and a full-bodied, sonorous dialect, with black and white light cuts that recall the neorealism of Fellini and Pasolini, I have reworked, through the grafting of the same symbolic evocations, the cinema of the time that they go on to tell as in an ancient fable, recovered with a grace, a lightness, an enchantment that cannot leave the audience indifferent. The film Lessons in Love represents, in a choral tale, a love story and memory, a story set in an arcane and remote Cilento, in the mid-sixties. It is an awakening to life, to human participation, an ancient tale: in Tolve, a village in Cilento, a young teacher, transferred from Salerno to his first assignment, discovers an unknown rural reality, ancient rites and traditions that fill him with wonder until he falls in love with Margherita, a young woman from the village who transforms the poetry of books into simple and natural expressions, through the magic of nature and the invisible. Thus, through this bond of love, the mountains, the pastures, the poor stone houses manage to reach their own suggestive poetic autonomy to become like speaking metaphors that almost do not need words to make us listen, understand, feel the arcane wonder and purity of those feelings that they want to tell.Other central themes are the constant counterpoint between childhood and old age, the eternal conflict between truth and deception, the theme of the double and the misunderstandings that intertwine in the humorous sequences of the film.

The stylistic figure that characterizes “Lessons in Love” is recognized in the “sublime from below”, that is to say in the ability to link the elegy to the comic, the verses of Leopardi to the visceral dialect of Cilento, the lyrical registers to the typical comedy of the commedia dell’arte.
The scenes have the desire to represent almost without filter those humble, innocent characters who live far away, among the things lost in the memory of grandparents’ stories.
The “epiphanic” parable is grafted onto the genre of the short story or the social story, a “revelation” of a timeless story, a parable that gives the opportunity to pay homage in his film to certain stylistic solutions à la Fellini.