MONICA PELLIZZARI



The Venice Festival audience at the screening of Fistful of Flies gave you a long and enthusiastic applause.

Very unreal, isn't it!

The reaction during the screening and the applause seemed to indicate that the Italians responded much more than might have been thought.

Yes, absolutely - much more than Australians. But that's all right. Actually the film's been well received in Europe - all the Scandinavian countries really like it and have bought it. It's interesting that it appealed to those dark souls, the countries of the dark soul. I feel that maybe I should have been born in Norway.

The title. We all know what a fistful of dollars is, but what does a fistful of flies mean?

It's an Italian saying, `Un Pugno di Mosche'. If you look it up in the dictionary, it means, basically, to be left with nothing if you follow your wild spirit. It's often applied by women to women. If you follow your wild spirit, that is, you don't follow the right path to getting a husband, then you'll end up with no husband and, therefore, with nothing, because you can't catch flies. It expresses the view that a woman's path is created for her and she shouldn't stray from it.

So this is the story of Mars. Is she going to finish up with a fistful of flies or is something more going to happen for her?

I think we know the answer to that. No, I just tried to turn the metaphor on its head. Flies are dirty things, too, so why would you want to catch them? But she manages to catch them at the end and release them, so...

You also had the machine in the house loudly catching flies all the way through the film.

Yes. That was a metaphor. It was trying to put that whole metaphor in an Australian context because flies are something that are part of our daily life. Actually, there was a scene where they swallowed flies - but I had to cut it.

She did eat one at one stage.

Yes, she was walking down the street and swallowed a fly. So I was just trying to accentuate the whole symbolic element of flies and turn it on its head because it's transported to Australia.

The country town itself - was that familiar territory?

The town is a mish-mash of where I grew up - Fairfield. When I grew up in the '60s it was like a country town and now it's a big metropolis. I just wanted somewhere that felt a isolated, so I thought of a country town, population 1000 or so, and we invented Cider Gully (cider leaves a bitter taste in your mouth). It's also a mish-mash of Griffith where I did most of my research, but I didn't want to set it in Griffith, or else I'd have the finger pointed at me and I'd be dead. So yes, it's a mixture of Fairfield and Griffith. Some country towns are soulless, a sense of no future.

You dramatise your insights into a girl's growing up in the Australian context and finding her identity in Australia - but dominated by her Italian heritage on that growing up.

What I'm exploring is the conflict between growing up in an Italian family by night while by day you're in the more Australian context because you're at school. It's a much wider society and the values are different; they're much less patriarchal, much more democratic than you would find within an Italian family structure. So most people I know who are bicultural experience that conflict. It's also a class issue. It's a strongly working-class issue and cuts across all ethnic backgrounds. It's that working-class background that believes in the father as the head of the family. Italians also have religion as part of their family structure as well. Whether they practise it or not, it's still part of their way of being. I just wanted to look at that duality and the conflict that arises from that duality. You literally feel like a split personality: you speak English, you don't speak Italian, you don't speak dialect, you don't understand it. It's something that will really be expelled by the next generation.

The father's behaviour was brutal - some of the scenes were extraordinarily brutal. You could have such violence within any other group in Australia, Anglo-Saxon? or Vietnamese but, somehow or other, the physical beating and the brutality you portray bring it home very, very strongly. Is this characteristic of what you see as happening in such patriarchal families?

Oh, yes. The research that I did and the girls that I've met, be they Italian, be they Turkish, Muslim, Lebanese, shows this happens. They'd get murdered. I'm sure you're familiar with that Lebanese story from Melbourne where a father tried to kill his daughter because she was going with a non-Lebanese man. Some of the girls I interviewed in Fairfield in 1993, 18 years old, 23, would have the same stories - say, if they put a poster up or a picture of a boy, a dressed boy, or a football player or something similar, not only would the fathers have it torn down, but they would act brutally. One girl in particular, her father would use a steel boot to stomp on her feet - and this girl still lives in that house. Unfortunately she's unemployed, can't move, is trapped. This is the same street I grew up in. It's my brother's friend's cousin. I found that pretty horrific.

You know, whether it's a belt, whether it's a boot or whatever, it's there, it's there in a really major way and they're trapped, these people. I met them, and they were so hostile towards me because they sussed me out immediately. They're trapped in this mentality of 50s repression. I went into this girl's room and I modelled my character's room on her room. Her mother went through her photo album and threw out pictures of school dos and things like that. She'd been photographed with boys and her mother would actually get scissors and cut the boys out. This goes on and it's really tragic. Stuff that I've researched scares me.

It horrifies me in this day and age that all this is still pocketed, especially because of the possibility of humiliation, `We must keep this within the family, we must not speak outside the family'. They have suffered racism as well, so no-one breaks out. Some do eventually but they still stay there and they accept it. Like one Greek family. I met a girl and she told me about her best friend, 15 - this was 1994 in Marrickville in inner city Sydney - her father saw her kissing an Australian boy, an Anglo Saxon boy, and he waited for her to get home then he raped her in front of her mother, the other sister and the brother. And he said, `This is what you get and you're not ever to kiss another boy'. No-one did anything about it at home. The sister went to the police and reported it but they said they couldn't do anything unless the girl came forward. This girl ended up pregnant and had to have a legal abortion. She still lives in the family, won't do anything about it. These stories are out there.

They're frightening to hear. Where do the men get this brutality? Is it just handed on from their fathers and reinforced?

Yes, I think it's handed down and reinforced. It's a question of shame and they just don't think about anything better. Another family I met - this girl ran away from Parramatta; her family are Turkish Muslims. Her father put a video camera in every corner of every room in the house and had his monitor. He monitored her 24 hours a day so that she wouldn't touch herself, so that she wouldn't be with anyone.

And his own inconsistency means nothing?

That's right and that's very common.

A lot of men don't like my film because, I think, they see the father painted as too brutal. And, yes, he is. There were about 20 more scenes but, because of performance, I had to choose to focus the film on the three women and to make the film work. The father was dragging my film down. So there was much more dimension to that character and a lot more going on that's simply gone. That's the price I paid for my first feature.

I was telling Lynden Barber of The Australian, who didn't like the film because it was too in-your-face - which I take issue with - that we are bombarded daily with in-your-face violence from male directors and no-one questions that. I went to see The Rock and came out needing trauma therapy. But no-one questions that. And the moment you have an out-there female theme where female sexuality is not represented as very realistic for men, it's criticised. So I took issue with him - not that he was interested. It's also an Anglo Saxon tradition, I think, that these critics prefer more minimalist films, but I didn't make my film like that so, therefore.... It's interesting that Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla and films like that get away with it, but I don't seem to get away with it, not with the Australian male critics.

One feels very much for the mother, but she did brutal things to her daughter.

She collaborated, too.

She seemed to be trapped in the Italian context though her accent was very flat Australian. But you don't think all the time of the Italian thing, but that this is an Australian country town. There were some moments of great tenderness amidst the brutality, for instance when they chased each other round the table establishing mother-daughter bonds. The bonds were there but her mother perpetuated a complete ignorance about sexuality.

I think it's a question of survival or you need to be a certina personality in order to survive. Given the situation, you're chopping and changing as you go. I've seen this within my own family - the complicity that goes on in order to survive. I see it in lots of families, everywhere, what people do in order to survive. It is ultimately a question about survival and power. And when you don't have power within that family dynamic - and a lot of women don't - you have to do things to survive. That's where the dychotomy between the characters comes in.

Rachel Mazza was impressive as the doctor, an aboriginal woman in a country town. Was your choice of actor deliberate?

It was deliberate. When I went to Griffith, there were a lot of Aborigines there. I chose not to include this as an issue base for characters. I didn't want an Anglo to come in and say, `We know best'. I take issue also with the fact that we never see Kooris represented as professionals. I wanted to show this but without making any statement. I'm glad I made the film without going through the AFC Aboriginal vetting unit. I just kept describing her as a dark person. A lot of people picked up on that in Italy as a positive thing. In Australia it's seen more as a tokenistic gesture. But you don't just make films for Australia, so who cares?

There was no warning, there she was.

No reference.

She did what she could and was very supportive, as a medical person should be.

Yes, exactly.

Irrespective of Mars' heritage, you are exploring sexuality itself. That seemed to be important as well. Do you think that's an important theme for contemporary Australian audiences at the moment, this kind of explicit awareness of adolescent sexual growth and development.

What I wanted to do is to say its okay to explore for yourself. I find that a lot of teenagers have sex too young. They don't know themselves. Before you know it, they're involved in relationships that are way beyond them, get pregnant, get married - they don't know themselves, be it physically, sexually, emotionally, as people. I wanted to show this within a context that didn't involve relationship, that didn't involve exploring sex through boys. It was about coming to terms with sexuality yourself. I think there is a certain amount of power for an individual to be gained from this. Men know this and feel very threatened by it. So that's what I was trying to say there. I didn't want to go for the love story element - which is so classic. I wanted the character to be on her own and to be able to work things out.

More specifically religious matters and their influence?

Did you like the fact that the audience clapped when the mirror went through the sky? I thought it was great. I was blown away, but the Italian audience really understood the irony of all the Catholic references.

You could have been more critical about the church. You let the church off lightly; you allowed the audience to laugh with the confessional sequence.

But what about the belt-strap that goes through the frame with the Madonna in the background?

The church of the last decades has been through a lot of this kind of observation and would be as critical, even if not more critical, than what was shown in the film. An interesting comparison would be between the responses of Italian Catholics watching your film and the Anglos.

I'm not into criticising the church because I actually believe that people need their faith if that's what's required in order for them to survive. But I do believe it's a crutch for society, for a lot of people who would rather not deal with knowing themselves or the pain. I actually see that in my family. A lot of people, as they get older, go to the church. So I'm not critical in that sense. I'm more interested in the myth of Madonna as another type of woman represented in the film. It's present there, subtle, but it's pervasive, all-pervasive.

It's amazing, I was simply walking down a street and a girl shouted out, `Porca, putana, Eva' which means `Pig, whore, Eve'. And I thought, oh, this is interesting. Eve is seen as a pig whore. And this was mouthed by a 14-year-old girl. That's what fascinates me, this mythology about virgins, the Virgin Mary and Madonnas, how this has shaped our society. And, yes, I think this is bad.

Mars' father has that kind of sanctified Madonna spirituality.

Yes. But the classic saying is that men want their wives to be an embodiment of the Madonna, the mother, - and the whore. And in my film I had all of that and more, all those sorts of women represented.

You had the Felliniesque touch with the statue coming down from the sky.

Well, everyone says Fellini, but it actually came from a Super 8 image that my dad shot when I was about six, and I remembered it. I remember because Gough Whitlam was there and a helicopter was carrying the Madonna. I was in the parade and I thought it was great and exciting. That's where it came from. And what I wanted to do was juxtapose an image of the modern Italian- Australian girl and this stereotype. It was just an image, a juxtaposition. I mean, I got blocked for film funding because people said that I was ripping off Fellini! No-one really remembers that it wasn't the Madonna. It was a statue of Jesus Christ. In Italy they see it as a homage. In Australia it was, `Oh, God, you're unoriginal'. No matter how much I protested and said it came from an element of truth in my history, no-one believes you, because the attitude is so negative.

Your short films, Just Desserts and Best Wishes - how similar and how different from Fistful of Flies?

What I wanted to do was to take consciously images and notions from Just Desserts and place them in Fistful of Flies because I wanted to reach a wider audience. With something like Just Desserts, because of the fact that it's a short, it doesn't reach the wider audience. So I was interested in exploring, at a full-length level, the idea of women and sexuality. Just Desserts had women, sexuality and food as well. Best Wishes was something really specific on its own.

The sexual abuse issue which is so much more prevalent now.

Not prevalent; it's much more out in the open.

Out in the open, yes, and your portraying it, especially within the family. That was quite strong. You also show the church and its rituals. Again you made an association as you did with the Madonna in Fistful of Flies. In Best Wishes it is much more the formalities of the church - which, perhaps, enabled this kind of abuse to happen. Is that a proper reading of it?

Yes. Best Wishes is really about three days leading up to a religious event that's meant to be very important in a child's life. And it was ruined. Fistful of Flies is more about how the church has its influence. It didn't directly relate to what happened to Mars, it was more indirect. You just live with the church, you go along to these festas and see the Madonna coming through the sky - not because you're religious but because you want to show your clothes off! Indeed we had scenes in the film where the lover and the mother check out clothing labels and the father flirted with the lover, but we cut it all out. And I just find that they're not religious - people aren't as religious as we think they are. As I said, it's only when they get closer to dying that they become religious. So yes, I think that Best Wishes was much more directly linked to religious ritual, whereas in Fistful of Flies it's just about being there, part of your culture, part of your upbringing, part of the way things are done.

The nonna and what she contributed. She was sympathetic in the early scenes when Mars was very little, but later...? Is she a wisdom figure?

Yes, she was very much an example of what comes through once you've worked your stuff out, that there is hope for change. I actually know women of that age who have gone through massive change through a crisis in their life, where they have rejected the church, rejected the patriarch and gone out on their own. It's been really hard and they're very bitter but, at the same time, they are much happier than when they were having the crap beaten out of them. She's very much modelled on particular women I know. But what I wanted to show was that she, of course, did the same thing to Grace. Grace didn't get it from herself. She got it because it was done to her in the chain of violence. I think the nonna just realised that she was responsible and in some ways tried to make amends through the relationship with her granddaughter. I didn't have a grandmother, so I fabricated that element.

There seems to be some final hope for Grace. With all she had experienced, the terrible situations with Mars and then with her mother coming back home, Grace can actually have something of a life before it's too late.

Yes, exactly. That's what I wanted to portray at the end of the film. She might break through and find a life for herself.


Interview: 7th September 1996