Presented in competition in a premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, Elisa [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] sees Leonardo Di Costanzo taking his previous feature film The Inner Cage [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Leonardo Di Costanzo
fiche film] - described by the director himself as “a film about the absurdity of prison” - in a new direction. The Inner Cage ended with the prisoner and the prison officer (Silvio Orlando and Toni Servillo) meeting up to talk about their past and their childhood spent in the same Naples neighbourhood. Elisa takes us to the fictitious female prison, Moncaldo, in Switzerland and its adjoining Department of Criminology, where Professor Alaoui (Roschdy Zem) is chairing a conference about so-called “restorative justice” for students and prisoners. Among the latter we find Elisa (Barbara Ronchi), a 35-years-old who’s been in prison for ten years, convicted for having killed her older sister and burned her body, for no apparent reason.

Alaoui plans to conduct his studies - involving a series of meetings with prisoners - in this model prison which feels like a luxury hotel in the snowy Alps, where prisons live in small wooden cottages scattered in the woods and can move about freely within the confines of the grounds. He’s particularly fascinated by Elisa’s story and, despite refusing the opportunity to take up work on the outside and get some distance from the prison, she agrees to meet with him. She’s always claimed she can’t remember what happened, even after the trial and in the subsequent years spent in a psychiatric hospital. Alaoui invites her to look back at what happened “with a fresh sense of perception”. The woman tells him about a mother “who didn’t want me” and a father who tasked her and her brother Franck with managing the huge family sawmill when she was only twenty years old. Elisa describes herself as “invisible”, someone who has always done everything to make everyone around her happy, allowing others to make decisions on her behalf. When the sawmill collapsed, the entire family blamed her, and her sister, Katia, whom Elisa sees as the version of herself who didn’t “fail”, falls victim to a clumsy but cruel act.

Ever-drawn to social themes, Di Costanzo’s film is loosely based on a real-life news item which was analysed in a book by criminologists Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali entitled Io volevo ucciderla. According to Ceretti, restorative justice radically transforms the concept of justice, where the key question is no longer “Who deserves to be punished?” but rather “How can we repair the damage?”.  Reparation is a deeply ethical process, preceded by a course of mediation which looks to rehabilitate relationships and a sense of dignity between perpetrators and victims. The film briefly introduces the character of a mother (played by Valeria Golino), who approaches the professor seeking answers to the senseless murder of her son, who was randomly attacked by his peers. Alaoui’s response is that we need “to understand the reasons for evil so as not to be mired in anger, all the while acknowledging our pain”. Thanks to Alaoui and his "restorative interviews", which lend a voice to perpetrators of violence, Elisa relives moments from her ferocious crime and pieces together memories through non-judgemental dialogue, in order to finally accept responsibility for her crime and embark upon a journey of inner change.

In the wintery atmosphere of this Alpine setting, perfectly captured by director of photography Luca Bigazzi, Di Costanzo follows this cold and manipulative yet deeply tormented woman using a documentary-like style of observation, while it falls to us, as viewers, to choose whether to refute this “monster” who was capable of carrying out such an extreme act, or to favour an approach which values empathic listening and returns a sense of humanity to the perpetrator of this crime.

Elisa was produced by Italy’s tempesta alongside RAI Cinema, in co-production with Swiss firm Amka Films. World sales are entrusted to RAI Cinema International Distribution.