There is a silence that runs through Separazioni, the new film by Stefano Chiantini presented at the Turin Film Festival and now in cinemas. A drama played almost entirely on the unsaid: Mara and Pietro, played by Barbora Bobulova and Adriano Giannini, are a couple who seem perfect, until their daughter Laura disappears during a trek in the mountains. From there the film tells how pain creeps into bonds and crumbles the family union, without ever raising its voice. Barbora Bobulova, Slovakian naturalized Italian actress, awarded several times in her career – most recently con the Golden Globe for For my good – he told us how his Mara was born.
What struck you most about the script, the way this family falls apart after Laura’s disappearance?
«What struck me most is the speed of this crumbling, this speed with which a chasm opens up, almost immediately. It’s not a slow, progressive thing: it was like an immediate earthquake. The happy family of the first scene immediately transforms into a nucleus in which everyone closes in on their own pain, and everything that was there before seems to disappear.”
The film opens with a statue of the Madonna being taken by chairlift towards the mountain. The same chairlift on which, without revealing too much about the ending, mother and daughter somehow find each other again. What meaning do you give to this parallelism?
«We didn’t talk about it with the director, but I read it like this: at the beginning the Madonnina is taken to the mountains to find her place there. In the end it’s as if, accompanying my daughter, I saw that Madonnina again finding her place. I give it to the mountain, because Laura doesn’t return, she remains swallowed up by this mountain. Mara is a character with great faith, who throughout the film hopes that her daughter will return, even after many days: that hope is not easily extinguished. But in that last scene he lets her go, as if he accepts the fact that he’s never coming back.”
Barbora Bobulova and Adriano Giannini in a scene from the film Separazioni
The characters never let themselves go into desperate tears, they always suffer in restraint. Why this choice, in your opinion?
«I believe it was the director’s intent: to tell this pain with great modesty and confidentiality, almost on tiptoe, because it is a true story, inspired by people he knew. Today we tend to spectacularize all feelings, and this is the opposite. From a logistical point of view it seemed like an almost impossible film, due to the cold and the snow, but it was the mountain that helped me: it doesn’t push you to scream, it inspires silence, it leads you to reflect, to be with yourself.”
Mara and Pietro move further and further away, each closed in their own pain. How did you and Adriano Giannini build this distance?
«It’s a job that’s difficult to describe, almost invisible: it’s all research, every day. It helped that we already knew each other from In Treatment, where we were already a bit of a couple. Once I have found entry into the character, I like to improvise, search on my own; Adriano, on the other hand, pushes the director more, asking him for more directions. Once that state of mind was triggered, all I had to do was put my costume and makeup back on for that mechanism to reactivate. We are different, but on the set there was always great respect: a disciplined, silent crew, because the story itself demanded that type of rigor.”
You are the mother of two daughters. How much did you draw from your personal experience to talk about the pain of a mother who has to abandon hope?
“It’s a bit of a professional secret, like asking a doctor to describe open-heart surgery to you. I always draw from my life: not only from when I became a mother, but from my entire history, even from childhood, from my most primary emotions.”
Before Separazioni there was Portobello, where you play Anna, Enzo Tortora’s sister. What do you have left of that experience?
«For me it was wonderful to return to Marco Bellocchio’s set after thirty years, since I was the protagonist of his Prince of Homburg, in 1997. The most shocking thing is that it has remained identical: full of the same energy, the same creativity as then. I think that man will outlive us all.”
Did your faith, if you have one, come into Mara’s character?
«Religion for me is a very private thing. I was not baptized, I come from an atheist family. For me religion is nature: there I find my true relationship with something bigger.”
