Corpo celeste

Alice Rohrwacher: Corpo celeste (IT/CH/FR 2011). Salvatore Cantalupo (Don Mario) and Yle Vianello (Marta). They fetch the dirty, wooden crucifix from the abandoned church in a ghost village high up on the mountain. From: IMDb.

Himlakropp. [Corpo celeste (heavenly body, celestial body) means an object in outer space, in Finnish "taivaankappale".]

MUBI streaming link with English subtitles of Corpo celeste, revisited in preparation for Midnight Sun Film Festival (MSFF) / Yle Areena TV introductions.

    Viewed at home, 9 Nov 2023.

I have already blogged about Corpo celeste when it was screened in the presence of Alice Rohrwacher at Midnight Sun Festival, 12 June 2014.

The following remarks are from my meditations in preparation for MSFF / Yle Areena TV introductions.

At the 2014 edition of Midnight Sun Film Festival I was impressed by Corpo celeste and Alice Rohrwacher's morning discussion. Accompanied by Olaf Möller, it was one of the last Sodankylä morning discussions by Peter von Bagh (the next day it was with Olivier Assayas, and the last one with Aki Kaurismäki). I have also blogged about Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice and La chimera.

Corpo celeste suggests a parallel for the 13-year-old Marta's coming of age and the Passion Play of Jesus Christ. It takes place in Reggio Calabria in the South of Italy, where the tip of the boot-shaped country almost touches Sicily.

Marta's physical body is undergoing the fundamental metamorphosis of becoming a woman. At the same time she is visiting a confirmation class where she is the worst pupil. Marta's family has repatriated to Italy from Switzerland, and she feels like a total stranger everywhere, including in her own body.

Rohrwacher's account of the school is humoristic, also satirical and ironical about the efforts of the Church to engage children via quiz games and pop songs. Some of the young girls dream of becoming show dancers on television in a Berlusconian bunga bunga mode. There are observations about political corruption.

Don Mario is the leader of the parish. He is what is called in Finnish leipäpappi [leipä = bread, pappi = priest], meaning a priest who only practices his trade to make a living rather than as a calling (this formulation quoted from Wiktionary).

The teacher of the confirmation class is the enterprising Santa who does everything she can to keep the children interested in the ancient faith. When she learns that Don Mario might be transferred, she breaks down in tears. We are left puzzled about a relationship that might resemble that in Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light.

For the confirmation ceremony Don Mario wants to fetch a life-size wooden crucifix from the deserted church in his childhood village high up on the mountain. There is only one inhabitant left in the ghost village: Don Lorenzo, a hermit priest.

With him Marta finds instant rapport. Don Lorenzo asks Marta to read from Mark 3:20-22 how crowds gather around Jesus in such magnitude that he and his disciples are not even able to eat. The family of Jesus think he is mad, and the teachers of the law claim that he is possessed by the devil.

Alone with the dirty, wooden crucifix, Marta begins to clean it tenderly, getting closer to the abandoned image of divinity, suffering and almost naked masculinity. When they drive back on the perilous mountain road, Marta repeats the quote from Mark to Don Mario. Startled, he loses control, and soon retrieves it, but the crucifix is already sliding away from the top of the car and falls deep down into the Mediterranean. It is a disgrace for Don Mario and probably prevents his much-anticipated promotion.

The sea is a key image in many ways. Marta's mother refuses to cook fish from the Mediterranean, because so many Moroccan refugees have drowned there, becoming fish fodder. In the conclusion, Marta in her white confirmation dress takes a baptism by walking into the sea in the same place where the church staff had drowned a sack full of kittens. 

Marta has been intrigued by the sentence "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"). Now she joins Jesus in her baptism in the Mediterranean.

An interesting double bill would be Corpo celeste and Eden, Ulla Heikkilä's film about the Finnish confirmation school. Ulla Heikkilä faces the fact that many tenets of the Church strike us as obsolete and even ridiculous. And yet. Even the stories in Genesis about the Expulsion from Paradise, Noah's Flood and the Tower of Babel are still potent with urgent meaning. "Life is God's speech". "The visible is timebound, the invisible is eternal". "The search is the reason why we are here".

The literal meaning of the title is "heavenly body", an object in outer space. Marta discovers an affinity with Jesus as an "extraterrestrial". But other associations and wordplays of the title Corpo celeste are relevant, too.

I sense that Alice Rohrwacher, like Rossellini and Fellini, has affinities with the Franciscan tradition - rejecting the corruption and empty phraseology of the Church, embracing the sacred in life. And reviving the atheist legacy of the holiness of the body like Pasolini. The body is the temple of love, corporeal and celestial. Body and soul.

A hallmark of Alice Rohrwacher's movies is that they are full of life. The vibrant quality in every scene is achieved also thanks to Rohrwacher's commitment to photochemical film, from Corpo celeste to La chimera. They have been shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35 mm, even when released digitally.