While I often find the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to be more cerebrally satisfying than anything else, their 1999 project, Sicily!, hit close to home. It is a more conventional, commercial output from the pair, and it’s replete with beautiful truisms about evolving identity, both politically and personally.
After decades of living in New York, a man returns home to Sicily!, where he is forced to confront a changed place. The film operates in a naturalistic, almost documentary style, a signature of Straub and Huillet, and takes him on a journey throughout the island. He meets with strangers who fill him in on the contemporary Sicilian existence—some simply share the mundane happenings of their every day while others disclose their political leanings, progressive and fascistic alike. They’re mostly poor, and the man, fresh from New York, is hyper aware of his class, of his own attitudes, as he engages with them. There’s an emotional weight to these conversations, however small they make seem, which eventually brings us to a climactic chat the man has with his mother, who engages him in a battle of perspective that forces him to question the foundations of his life.
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I often wonder how you successfully draw a compromise between who you were before leaving home and who you’ve become since. We often leave home to escape an identity that was thrust upon us, the expectations of our families and communities. I often feel, perhaps unfairly, that I have become who I’ve become in spite of where I’m from, resisting the values and ideologies I was raised with. This feels true of the returning man.
Hating everything you were raised on feels like an organic step in a process. It’s essential to ~find yourself,~ and to do that you often have to feel radical and hateful. It feels necessary to reject everything you’ve been raised with in order to figure out, grounds up, what you actually believe about yourself and the world around you. However, once you’ve done that, once you’ve created a nice scaffolding for yourself, the difficult work begins.
In Sicily!, the man has to reconcile the myth he’s created about himself with that of the people and culture who raised him. His conversation with his mother is a painful yet familiar rite of passage, where he bridges his own perspective of his upbringing with her reality, which is in conflict with how he’s imagined his youth.
Specifically, the man and his mother focus on his deceased father, and their opposing ideas of the kind of person he was. The man has lived with a fairy tale image of his dad, a progressive artist who has undoubtedly shaped his morals. We can infer that this is what took him to New York, what made him desire to be worldly and conscience.
His mother informs him that so much of this impression is a fantasy, or at least a small part of a fuller picture. She tells him that is father was abusive, unfaithful, and a misogynist who made her life hell. This is hard for the man to hear. Calling into question his father’s character is, in a way, calling into question his own character. They go back and forth for a while, and while there’s no clear outcome, one can imagine that her words have fucked him up.
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I also left home with an absolute sense of what it made of me. I discovered so much about myself off of narratives I told myself upon vacating: of feeling left out, of feeling marginalized, of feeling like a victim to a hateful and regressive value system. Some of this is fair and true, of course, that damage was done, but a lot of it, like it is for the man in Sicily!, comes out of a desire to latch onto an adolescent idea about yourself that you can carry on with you on a journey to self-actualization.
The bursting of this bubble comes with returning home. The challenge, for me at least, is to make peace with all the different aspects of myself, including who I once was, what people once thought of me, with where I’m at currently. It is painful realizing that you are an amalgamation of nature and nurture, and that your concrete perspective about how you’ve managed to become who you are, is only half-true. It’s why going home, for so many of us, is so activating. It’s why this movie did a little number on me.