Daria Deflorian Antonio Tagliarini

Antonioni sounds out the post-war historical changes, which he calls “alienation”. In today’s world, the urgency of which calls for ever-increasing levels of adaptability, Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini focus on the pertinence of this question of the petrified glance or look. They dilate their zone of predilection, the interstice between appearance and reality, in order to create a dialogue between fictional and real, inside and outside, and stories or histories great and small. Their attentions centre on the splendid woman-child that Monica Vitta embodies as she crosses the desert of her life. Similar to Antonioni’s film, the piece sets up an anti-realist tension in its depiction of a sick, paradoxical world. This world is shown in all its beauty, but we no longer know how to look at it. Like a ghost that nobody can touch, neither husband, nor child, nor lover, Giuliana wanders aimlessly around Ravenne’s sordid industrial suburbs, here the scene of workers’ strikes. In the film, she contemplates what becomes its main character: the landscape. She wants to see the true and to see true, regardless of the curtains and fences. Jean-François Rauger talks of the terrifying vision of the invisible or unavowed that Antonioni offers us. In the theatre space, it seems that this pure quest for truth is precisely what Quasi niente succeeds in renewing.
––––––
Estimated running time : 1h40
Performed in Italian with French subtitles