It’s the 1970s. An American woman travels to Israel to uncover a secret about her past. She crosses paths with a man who grew up with three fathers in a village of colonists in 1930s Palestine. Based on Meir Shalev’s novel of the same name, Guido Chiesa’s new movie For the Love of a Woman [+lire aussi :
interview : Guido Chiesa
fiche film] moves between the past and the present to reconnect the invisible thread binding these two characters to another woman who turned everyone’s lives upside down when she arrived in that village in 1935. We chatted with the director at the 16th Bari Bif&st, where the film was selected in the Italian Cinema Competition.

Cineuropa: This film is somewhat different from your more recent works, which have mostly been comedies. How did you come across this story?
Guido Chiesa: I should say, I started making comedies by chance. It went well and from that point onwards is became hard to do anything else. The old head of Colorado, Maurizio Totti, had had this project in his office drawer for a long time; to begin with, Gabriele Salvatores wanted to do it – we’re talking twenty years ago. Knowing that I wanted to make a different kind of film, Maurizio eventually said: “Look, this is a novel that we’d like to adapt but we haven’t managed it yet. Maybe you’ll know what to do with it”. I read it and it’s a crazy novel, a bit like One Hundred Years of Solitude. It tells a few different stories, moving from the past to the present in quite a chaotic way. But then me and my wife (who I write with) came up with an idea which helped us to approach it from an outsider’s viewpoint. The story about Esther - an American woman who receives a letter from her mother - was one we invented ourselves. And this woman who doesn’t know anything about her past, not least because the most significant part of it has been denied to her, is a bit like us, who don’t know anything about that particular world. After the First World War, Palestine was handed over to the British and there was an exodus of Jewish people towards that region, who wanted to create a new world, a more supportive and egalitarian society. Almost all of them were young, and very cultured, and male-female relationships were very rare in Europe.

The open-mindedness of that society is staggering, for that era. The moment when that ménage à quatre is created is depicted as a happy period for everyone, there isn’t any rivalry between these men and the protagonist is a woman who’s impossible to subjugate.
This is something you still find in Israeli society today: the women are really tough. The story about the past is told by Zayde, who was a child at the time, so he experiences everything as if it were some sort of myth. But then we move to the Seventies and things are different; there’s the war, an ongoing conflict, and his own story is that of a man who finds it impossible to love, who’s too attached to that past.

In terms of the film’s tone, it’s a really intense and sometimes tragic story, but there’s also a kind of romantic saga which develops around Yehudit’s character, which serves to lighten the film.
This is typical of Jewish culture, and it appears in the novel too. What I can add is the fact that I’ve worked on comedies for so many years, means that I like to make films thinking about what will make the audience feel good, without being afraid of using humour, or melodrama, either. The leukaemia story doesn’t feature in the book. People ask me why I added it. I say, why not? It’s a way of engaging the audience’s emotions. What I want from this point onwards is to make films which stir emotions more than they convey messages, but which also draw viewers into the creative process behind the film: the viewer has to participate in order to follow the story.

For the Love of a Woman tells a compelling story, it’s shot in English and it stars an international cast. Have you already sold it abroad?
To date, the film has received lots of knock-backs from distributors and festivals, including the Berlinale, because it’s set in Israel and because of fears there’ll be protests over the film. But it seems to have found its way with Fandango; it will be distributed in Italy either right before or right after the summer, and then elsewhere too, we hope.