So far most user reviews of Arcana express bewilderment as to the meaning of its narrative, but it's not very complicated:
Spoilers:
This is a story of clashes between cultures, more than anything else.
Mrs. Tarantino has escaped the poverty of Southern Italy (Sicily) together with her husband and their only son, and moved to the rich industrial city of Milan, situated in the rich Northern parts of Italy.
Mrs. Tarantino - whose surname we know, her husband's surname being printed on a name tag on the apartment door - has escaped the poverty of Southern Italy (Sicily) together with her husband and their only son, and moved to the rich industrial city of Milan, situated in the rich Northern parts of Italy.
They carry with them to the Milanese, their foreign culture which to a large part is not well understood by Italian Northerners. The Tarantinos' culture is more inspired by Turkish and gypsy culture (as heard in the quite aggressive gypsy violin theme, which is a major ingredient of the music track, also carried in the images of a a wandering Sicilian violinist, playing as he walks on a road to - who knows?) . We are shown "incomprehensible" images and topics brought from the South, of strange dances, snakes, a woman regurgitating frogs and a donkey in a hoist being elevated outside a house; events that would be familiar to us if we knew more about Sicilian culture.
The Sicilian rural culture is shown to carry elements of incest, superstition, and trickery as a way of life in a heavily competitive environment. The views on theft, rape, body and bodily fluids differ from the more polished suit bearers of the North.
To support his family the husband did maintenance work on the subway, where he replaced rail tracks and laid new ones as the subway network expands. The subway workplace is a metaphor for the Sicilians' social status, they are literally run into the ground to do the "dirty work" for corporate Milan.
One day Mr. Tarantino lost his legs as a train ran him over. His workmates carried him outside into the sunlight, but he soon died as a result of the accident.
Now left to a meager widow's pension not matching Mrs. Tarantino's social and economic ambitions, she scams the Milanese of their money by pretending to be a psychic, because she wants more beautiful furniture, and a new, modern and more beautiful home.
We don't get to know Mrs. Tarantino's Christian name and hence she is less of an individual, more representing a people, a different one; foreigners that we don't know.
Mrs. Tarantino despises her stupid, desperate clients, and uses psychology intuitively to manipulate them and gives them just enough of "right" answers. This is to lure them into becoming psychologically dependent on her "consultation services", and to come more often, giving up even more of their "Northern" money.
To the viewer, the son (also nameless) is presented as a true psychic and natural born magician, who draws from their common arcane and "foreign" culture of the South to influence the mothers' clients.
Aggressively, the son throws his mother's mock talismans composed of salt and sawdust away, and creates his own, very functional and dangerous ones, by picking soil materials from the subway dirt where his father was killed by the onrushing capitalist-industrialist train.
He will use photographs and objects to "get under the clients' skin", and dip into their souls, creating havoc, by first cutting out their eyes from a photo of man to go blind; he will stab the abdomen of a woman in another photo causing her to give birth to an expected child deaf, dumb and blind, while also raping a customer because he desires her body.
The violated young woman's name we do get to know, therefore she is one of "us". Yet she comes back for more "guidance" as her psyche deteriorates.
The son will also put his mother's stockings over his head like that of a robber wanting to not be recognized, to get access to the mother's vagina by tying, raping her to satisfy his youthful and lonely penis often erect, and by doing so extracting more of her accumulated knowledge of Sicilian "magic knowledge" out of her, to get back at the people who destroyed his family.
The more the Sicilian culture is put as "spells" and "talismans" on the Milanese who come for "spiritual guidance", the worse the Milaneses' lives become, until they go totally mad and psychotic.
(Northern) Media outlets of the times when this film was made, not uncommonly reported on the "underachievement" of the industrial production performance in the South, and stories about Southerner workers not producing even one months' worth of a yearly production volume - compared to that of workers Northern cities like Milan - have been persistent and commonplace. The Italian Northerners have historically often frowned upon the Italian Southerners for their "laziness" and general "third world behaviour". In the film, Sicilian fake "pensioners" queue to get their benefits, feigning disabilities or committing other types of fraud, as police comes identifying the fraudsters and brutally arrest them and carry them away. So yes, there is a racist element to the situation in this film, although it in fact is open to personal interpretation as to the director Giulio Questi's personal stance.
The easiest view to take - and the most difficult for a director to convey - is that Questi sees the conflict from a position of understanding, more than blaming the Milanese or the Sicilians for their incompatibility and for the conflict.
But if we are biased we may, for instance, see a Marxist critique of the capital forces of a Fascist state (where capital and government have merged), which inhumane power we can clearly see towards the end when soldiers start shooting at civilians, and thus display another facet of Fascism: the carrying out of the capitalist state's dictates and policies by use of its monopolistic violence.
The alternative interpretation is also possible, albeit more difficult to adopt: That the socio-economic pressure on the North by the South must be handled in any which way, or else the people will all "go mad", or the society which they constitute will become even more dysfunctional.
The film opens with a statement from Questi: "To the viewers, This film is not a story. It's a card game. This is why the beginning is not credible nor is the ending. You are the players. Play well and win."
The card game refers to the Tarot game used extensively by Mrs. Tarantino, more than a poker game card deck. Thus we, in front of the movie screen - and also the corporate Fascist state - play with more than markers or money, we play with life and death, happiness and sorrows.
A guess is that a solution to Questi's film, and the card game he presents as a puzzle, would have been a separatist one between autonomous regions living in peace or competitively - sometimes at war with each other, as in history - rather than having a united Italy where the the populations of the North and the South are held as hostage by a Fascist super government forcing all peoples' cultures to either clash or go extinct in the name of a centralized power. But in regard to the interpretative options of the film, there are probably several other ways to solve Questi's puzzle.
1 out of 1 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink