The role of ambiguity in the festival documentary.
Normal
dir. Adele Tulli, 2019, Italy
genre: poetic-observational
When I think of ambiguity in fiction films, it seems to me that openness can work on several levels. The classic art cinema gambit, as in The 400 Blows, is to leave some central narrative conflict without closure. At the other end, the entire narrative might be ambiguous, as in The Intruder. Or, both narrative and conflict might be clear but there might be a thematic ambiguity.
Festival documentaries often trade in this last kind of thematic ambiguity: does Austerlitz disapprove of the way tourists act or is it merely showing their actions dispassionately? What does the death of migrants mean for the residents of Lampedusa in Fire at Sea?
I’ve not seen this dynamic so clearly on display as in Normal, a poetic-observational documentary about gender in Italian society (and by implication elsewhere). Director Adele Tulli implicitly counters the sometime masculinist gaze of this genre by using the formal devices to present a composite view of gendered behavior, from leisure culture to marriage and childrearing roles. It’s a simple conceit that can be effective in defamiliarizing activities that one does not automatically read as gendered.
I did find some of the examples to be too easily or even problematic. For instance, a scene of excited teenage girl fans of a pop star struck me to be potentially as condescending as the similar gaze in The Lonely Boy (audience members in my viewing certainly scoffed derisively at the fans.) And while the inclusion of more explicitly patriarchal speeches may make sense, I found the more purely observational footage of activities like a water slide to be more revelatory.
What I was craving through most of the film in fact was something less disambiguous. But the ending had me reflecting on this. I won’t reveal the last scene, but it includes the film’s first depiction of something that does not fit the rigid binary of patriarchal gender roles – but ambiguously so. For me it was a touching end which made me read the film retrospectively in a different way. And it also could be read by different viewers in an opposite manner than my reaction.