Opinion
Innocence is a sin
“Looking is very difficult, because it is the last thing you learn, when everything else begins to be missing”, answers the old anthropology professor to the young Parthenophe, the protagonist of the latest film by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino. This phrase is perhaps not only the key to understanding the motley mosaic of scenes and images that make up Sorrentino's universe, but also a way of claiming the critical positioning that can imply apparent exercises of evasion such as letting oneself be carried away by what is presented before our eyes. The opposite case was shown by Pasolini in the short film La sequenza del fiori di carta. Over the course of just under ten minutes, the young man named Riccetto walks carefree with a red paper flower in his hand through the streets of Rome accompanied by the voice-over of a superior being. During his happy stroll, the montage is interrupted by the rawest images in the history of the first half of the 20th century. Ricetto is warned by the voice-over: “Innocence is a sin, innocence is a sin, do you understand? And the innocent will be condemned because they no longer have the right to be. I cannot forgive what happens to the happy gaze of innocence amidst injustices and wars, horrors and blood.”
Sorrentino and Pasolini propose a dialogue through time in which both directors seem to agree on a crucial point: looking is not a passive act, but an ethical exercise. And while Sorrentino invites us to observe with a gaze that mixes melancholy and surprise the hidden beauty, even in the darkest and most ambiguous corners of the human condition, Pasolini offers no refuge in front of a mirror that returns us an image that forces us to face the rawness of reality without sweeteners, without escape. If Riccetto is dragged into a brutally imposed consciousness, Parthenophe strives to learn to look differently: not as an exercise in judgment or condemnation, but as a way of inhabiting the paradox of not knowing, an exercise in active commitment to the knowledge to come. Ultimately, a warning before and against indifference to what happens before our eyes.
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