California Italian Studies

According to film historian Giampiero Brunetta, the success of Luca Lucini’s Tre metri sopra il cielo (Three Steps Over Heaven, 2004) and Fabio Brizzi’s Notte prima degli esami (Night Before the Exams, 2006) is emblematic of the current “crisis” of Italian cinema. The premise of Brunetta’s negative comments are primarily aesthetics (bad script, bad direction), while other reviewers have blamed the same films for unrealistic portrayals of Italian teenagers, and expressed their concerns about the moral and social influence that such mis-representations might have on the young spectators. My essay begins from these negative accounts to suggest an alternative reading of contemporary Italian teen movies, by which I mean popular fictions that both represent teenagers and market teenage audiences. These movies constitute a “filone” (cycle) on the basis of similarities in plots and characters, narratives formulas, choice of actors and actresses, and commercial strategies. At the core of the successful cycle of teen films, I argue, there are the tropes of freedom and choice, and the concepts of agency and individualization. These ideas are fundamental to the construction of the neo-liberal subject, rather than some deviant example of social and moral behaviors, and thus worth of our attention. Furthermore, sexuality and the sexualization of both the male and the female bodies are central discourses to the film narratives and visual strategies, which inform a configuration of gender/sex system whose features have been widely discussed by scholars in British and American cultural and film studies, under the label of “postfeminism.” In this essay, films such as Federico Moccia’s Amore 14 (2009) will be taken as examples to suggest a taxonomy of postfeminist female characters, in their various declinations. I will contextualize contemporary Italian productions in relation to critical texts on postfeminism such as Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism, and studies on female-oriented cycles such as Hilary Radner on American girly films. My intention is to shed light on both the specificities of the Italian context and the continuities across national borders, in a globalized and transnational film industry.