A Woman who Yearns for Liberation from all her Life Roles “The Disappearance of My Mother” – Movie Review

“The Disappearance of My Mother” is a memorable documentary that presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of Benedetta Barzini, an Italian fashion model and feminist intellectual. Italian filmmaker Beniamino Barrese, her son, has been photographing and filming her since he was a teenager. Beniamino obviously uses the film as a way of storing memories of her mother, tracing her journey from her charismatic past to her waning present.

Thanks to appropriate film techniques, the documentary is well organized, informative and dramatically bewitching. Frequent close-ups of Barzini’s eyes impress the audience with her look of resentment; she disapproves of publicity, of social life and even of the entire world. Her wrinkled face magnified strongly smacks of her wisdom and sense of individuality, which accrue with her age. The close-up of the mole on the cheek of a young model instantly replaced by that on a wrinkled face is a remarkable arrangement for Barzini’s first appearance in the documentary.

Besides, stock footage, both still images as well as archival film, is inserted into the documentary to enhance the description of Barzini’s involvement in women empowerment activities when she was still in middle age, thus showing her strong personality as an outspoken feminist with hatred for gender inequality and calling for a way of co-existing that would end sexism.

Narrative montages with a series of short shots are also used to indicate changes in time and place within the film. Now a university lecturer in her mid seventies, she still harbours contempt for the world based on male philosophy. Raising doubt about what she refers to as prototypes of beauty, she suggests that women disappear from men’s imagination. She tells her students that women equal Nature while men are for thought and reason. Quite surprisingly, though, she sees the image of a mother holding a baby the highest symbol of tenderness and love, and considers that even a business woman’s role is a mother.

With the use of the filmic flashback, structuring its narrative partly through memory, the director is careful to present selected evidence to Barzini’s long cherished intention of disappearing from public life though it is not known exactly when and how the plan was initiated. On several occasions, Barzini has hinted at “vanishing”. Amidst the mid-movie flashbacks of Barzini’s captivating appearances on catwalks and magazine covers in her youth, the wrinkle-faced former supermodel, speaking to the camera, expresses her annoyance at images. She is more interested in things that cannot be seen and wishes to walk concealed within her privacy. As she puts it, her real self is “unphotographable”. In a picture taken of her at the age of 15, she looks malnourished. She thinks that refusing to eat is one thing women can do in protest against family control and is pleased to feel her body vanishing. In addition, she is intent on vanishing from society, actually from a race to which she does not feel a sense of belonging as she disagrees with their current values. More than once, Barzini has been seen swimming in the sea with the voice-over narration of her wish to escape from it all. And the shot showing her disappearing beneath the waves is particularly expressive.

Barzini makes occasional protests against being filmed though most of the time she yields to her son’s whims. The verbal communication between mother and son during the filming process adds to the realism of the story. In fact, using a hand-held camera, the director is not hesitant about showing trifling details of Benedetta’s private life and even her unglamorous habits. However, there is some doubt about the naturalness of the filming as the director has once or twice put himself in front of the camera, appearing side by side with his mother, or contrasted against her in the mirror.

It is also doubted whether certain scenes have been constructed artificially to add to the documentary’s dramatic appeal. This is particularly apparent when they are discussing how the documentary will be brought to an end. In one scene, for example, she is seen walking in the woods, and in another, she is rowing a boat in the wide open sea, both giving the impression of her final disappearance when suddenly she appears again in her messy room smoking her usual electronic cigarette.
On the whole, the gripping documentary gives a complete picture of a fascinating central figure, provoking much thinking about what beauty actually means and what is more pursuable than the glamour of limelight. “The Disappearance of My Mother” is indeed a film too good to miss.