Where Desire Does Not Liberate
A Dark Reversal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lesbian Panic
Between the implacable shadows of the rooms of a castle in the Upper Canavese—transformed into chambers of consciousness—and a 1950s Turin of smoke and stone, where everyone lives a double life, unfolds the story of Giulia, a fallen countess armed with a fascination that captivates and obsesses.
Torn between gambling and a fragile husband, Giulia does not hesitate to sell her body for a few chips, until she falls into the web of Baroness Baresi, whose husband Giulia has taken as a lover. It is the baroness who sends Ornella to the castle—an ex-laundress haunted by her mother and now the new mistress of the house—supported by Prospera, the governess.
In the name of morality and guilt, Ornella and Prospera subject Giulia to a series of dehumanizing humiliations, trying to repress what cannot be spoken: a desire between women that social hysteria would turn into guilt and panic. Yet in doing so, they themselves fall into a bond of obsessive dependence on Giulia, even as they hand her over to Franco, the stableman, a brutal and archaic body who embodies a different order—fierce and primitive.
As in a dark reversal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the return to the masculine here does not coincide with liberation, but with an extreme and ambiguous choice: a restoration of patriarchy sought as order and lived as abyss.
Between desire, domination, and degradation, each character moves along the boundary between control and the abyss, unable to escape what attracts and destroys them.
