Angela/o and the Gender Disruption of Masculine Society in Purple Sea

Abstract

Purple Sea (2009),¹ directed by Donatella Maiorca, is one of only a few Italian films that deal directly with the theme of lesbianism, and Maiorca’s representation of the relationship between the two main characters, Angela (Valeria Solarino) and Sara (Isabella Ragonese), establishes the film as a forerunner in this field.² Indeed, the struggle to realize this love story is not an incidental or secondary motif of the film, but the central one. Inspired by Giacomo Pilati’s novel Minchia di Re (2004), in the transition from the written word to visual images, the film puts more emphasis on the “irregular” love between the two girls, while the book focuses exclusively on the protagonist and her life as a female husband and cross-dressing woman, independent of the lesbian relationship. The latter, therefore, adopts more the feature of abildungsroman, narrating the life of the protagonist beyond the marriage and ending with her death, where the former is based on the specific struggle of the two girls to realize their relationship in spite of the patriarchal society to which they are subjected. The difference—here only quickly mentioned—between the book and the film underlines the clash and the disruption represented by the story of Angela within the patriarchal society as it is figured in Maiorca’s work. As a matter of fact, the film plot developed alongside the love story discloses specific attention to gender relationships and their connection to the exercise of power, broadening the issue from the historical time in which the narration is set (the end of nineteenth century) to the contemporary age, and spatially from a little village on the island of Favignana, Sicily, to the wider Italian society.