Projects
The Last Queen
All Lorena has ever known is work and selflessness. Until she pretends to be Marie Antoinette.
A small town by the Venice lagoon. Lorena is a middle- aged, overburdened, working-class, family woman. She is proud of her reputation as a serious, selfless woman and devoted mother. One day, at a local fair, a healer on stage identifies her as the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. Lorena and the crowd burst out laughing, but an old Countess in a wheelchair, in a semi-vegetative state, gains consciousness seeing her and cries for the emotion of meeting Marie Antoinette. The Countess’ caretaker begs Lorena to play along: it is the first time the woman woke up in months! Lorena, who can’t say no to people in need, pretends to be Marie Antoinette for the lady. And from this moment Lorena begins to secretly play Marie Antoinette more and more often for the old woman in her crumbling villa, isolated in the middle of the lagoon. She brings props, she comes up with new acts and ideas... She claims that she is just happy to help, but the more she comes back, the more she uncovers a playful, childish, free side of herself that was unknown to her up to this point and that now demands to exist. In this villa between the land and the water, Lorena unexpectedly comes closer to her deep desires and discovers the beauty of getting lost.
We grew up in a context where the value of dreams and listening to oneself has been relegated to a small corner of daily life, in favour of the quest for apparent well-being and a functional role in society. This is even truer in North-Eastern Italy, the Italian region that, more than any other, likes to describe itself as the land of productivity, populated by people “who work hard and roll up their sleeves”. What would happen if these beliefs were questioned by an absurd game, but precisely for this reason of deflagrating force? In The Last Queen, comedy helps to soften the intimate and profound drama that Lorena, our protagonist, is living and which characterises all the characters of the film in different ways: the need to hang on to illusions for fear of freely exploring one’s true desires – from the aristocrats who pretend to still be living in the past to Lorena’s community, people hiding behind the cult of work and efficiency, all the while lying to themselves. It is this that Lorena glimpses in its basic form during her journey and with which she is finally able to come to terms.
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