Those who saw and loved Small Body [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Laura Samani
fiche film] - presented in Cannes’s Critics’ Week in di 2021 and beloved by critics - will think they walked into the wrong screening room when watching A Year of School, the second film by Laura Samani, competing in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. Set at the end of the 800s in a small Friuli fishing village, the rigorous Small Body was performed in the Firulian language and shot with a handheld camera, and told a story of personal pain permeated by magical realism. Set in 2007, A Year of School is a coming-of-age story that addresses themes such as gender equality and emotional detachment, yet without giving up on a certain carefree propensity for comedy.

We are in Trieste in the year in which the Europe of the Schengen area is widening and the border between Italy and Slovenia definitively falls. Arriving in a boys class in their last year at a technical institute is Fred (played by newcomer Stella Wendick), the daughter of a Swedish manager sent to Trieste to implement a redundancy plan in the local office of a multinational company. As a welcome, her boisterous classmates - representatives of a mild form of provincial machismo - hide her clothes during basketball training, forcing the girl to go home wearing only a towel. And yet, the presence of the carefree stranger catalyses the attention of the students, all the more so since Fred is used to spending her evenings drinking beer with boys and socialises in particular with a trio of inseparable friends (Giacomo Covi, Pietro Giustolisi, and Samuel Volturno, all newcomers). “But she’s like a man”, one of them says to defend himself in front of his girlfriend who reprimands him for this nighttime company, while she has to respect a curfew. The Nordic naturalness in Fred’s relationships creates more and more rivalry and jealousy, which will lead to a breakup before the end of that fateful school year.

Announced by exuberant and colourful opening credits, the film is shot by Samani, with the help of director of photography Inès Tabarin, like a youthful comedy with a decidedly feminine angle and sensibility, drawing on the experiences of so many teenage girls who grew up in a world dominated by men. Its light-hearted structure intentionally and necessarily betrayed the eponymous novel by Gianni Stuparich on which it is based, a small masterpiece of Italian literature from which Franco Giraldi had made a miniseries in 1977. Published in 1929, in the middle of the twenty years of Fascism, the book is set in the Habsburg Trieste of 1909, when a new law allows women access, until then denied, to the eighth year of secondary school and therefore to university, the road to conquering a future of freedom and independence. The protagonist Edda Marty represents a feminine ideal that could only be born in that cultural crossroads of Middle-European influences: at once fragile and strong, sweet but irreverent and “reckless”, as Stuparich calls her. If the film expresses on the one hand the interior dimension of this sense that an unforgettable romantic season is ending, Edda - as essayist Cristina Benussi has observed - doesn’t only embody a personal experience, but also a female archetype of emancipation, by which the novel reflects a cultural transformation that anticipates the public role of women, making her a woman that was “revolutionary for the time”.

Unfortunately, we don’t find this urgency of social change in the film, all the more so since the person breaking taboos and destabilising the patriarchy is a foreign subject, given that, incomprehensibly, a young woman from Northern Europe has been chosen as the protagonist, a cliché referring to high levels of gender equality in that region that sadly defuses the possibility of identifying the heroine of the film within the local social nucleus.

A Year of School is an Italian-French co-production by Nefertiti Film with Rai Cinema in co-production with Tomsa Films and Arte France Cinéma. International sales are handled by Rai Cinema International Distribution.