Alba Rohrwacher: “Every mother is wonderful”

Alba Rohrwacher dreamed of doing the acrobat: «As a child I was fascinated by circus, from that dimension, I imagined myself on stage doing stunts. It was a dream. ” In that world she brought her the last role she played for the cinema, that of a weird mother, artist and anaffective, who spends her days staging street performances with her beloved little dog. A character who believes himself a bit Pina Bausch a bit Marcel Marceau, furiously sews the stage costumes, dedicates his life to art convinced that “we owe life to art”, sets up the scene with his four rags, and only at the extreme margins of his life is his daughter, with whom he lives in Rome, in the Garbatella district. The little girl loves her mom, but she just loves the dog Marcel. The film is called Marcel! and is the first feature film directed by Jasmine Trinca, who plays his mother in part. Recently presented at the Festival of Cannescomes out in theaters on June 1st.

What attracted you to this role?
«The complexity and the possibility of telling a non-ordinariness».

Why are you interested in non-ordinariness?
“I am attracted by the complexity, by the unpredictability, by the scripts that give me this type of characters”.

This is an out-of-the-box character.
“Able to alternate moments of cruelty with moments of extreme sweetness, she is a repulsive woman, totally absorbed by her art, to the point of being able to seem selfish, a mother whom the child looks at with an ambivalent feeling of hate and love”.

How non-ordinary do you feel?
“I do not know. I believe that in a certain sense we are all extraordinary, everyday heroes ».

She once again plays a “wrong” mother.
«Often in the stories I meet there is talk of complex motherhood. In Dark daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal there is a mother (Jessie Buckley, later Olivia Colman, ed) that is inside a pattern and then manages to break it. In Three floors by Nanni Moretti I am a mother who is crushed by motherhood managed in solitude, who slips into madness and cannot save herself ».

Why all these unconventional mothers in the cinema?
“We are living in a moment in which there is interest in this type of story, it is finally given a voice. Around the world it is difficult to talk about “wrong” mothers. But perhaps within them lies the truth of all mothers. In error there is often the truth ».

What strikes you about this truth?
«I am interested in the ambivalence that mothers sometimes experience between deeply loving their children and the urge not to betray their nature and their vocation. In Jasmine’s film, the character of the mother is faithful to her feelings, so much so that in the eyes of her daughter, she is at times ruthless ».

Mothers are always under observation.
“There is this idea of ​​the angel of the hearth that still resists over time, a model to which everyone feels they have to conform. I don’t think there is a perfect recipe for joining any role. But I am convinced that if you show the crookedness, the error, the viewer will stop and think ».

Would you like to become a mother?
“We will see”.

How’s it like?
“I have a very strong relationship with her. The mother in the film The wonders by Alice (director Alice Rohrwacher, his sister, ed) was inspired by her ».

Does it look like her?
“Well yes. Alice had a hard time finding an actress to play her, she had to explain what she was like and it wasn’t easy. So she asked me, I was reluctant at first, the character had a teenage daughter, I felt out of touch. But then her idea of ​​her of this character was so precise and at the same time inexplicable that only she was able to pass it on to me. That character is not our mother but someone who is extremely close to our feeling ».

Did your mother recognize herself?
“I don’t really know. We talked a lot about the film while we were making it and after. But never playing the game of similes. We certainly told it with love ».

The character of Wonders is a loving mom.
«Loving and very caring with the daughters, despite the thousand practical things to which he is always behind. A support. Alice and I have always felt free to do what we believed in, to really pursue our dreams, however seemingly unlikely. We got support and open-mindedness from our parents. The possibility of making our dreams our job comes from them ».

Does it bother you when asked about your childhood in the countryside in Umbria?
“I got bored first of telling it and then of rereading it in a newspaper, so when they ask me I try to escape.”

In Marcel! his character repeats over and over a motto: “We owe life to art”. What do you think of it?
«In the film, this woman’s journey leads her to understand that in reality life is not only due to art, but to life. As for me, I also owe my life to art. I owe a lot to this job, she even saved me somewhere. Giving my heart to this tension, to acting, has given me back a lot of life ».

Did it make sense to you?
“A deeper meaning, yes. He gives it to me every day, the curiosity in discovering a character, the surprise, listening to the other, the drive towards a common project. This too is the greatness of art for me ».

It is a vocation.
«Thank you for having found it, it was like putting order in the chaos, finding a direction. I had taken a completely different path, I had enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine, and I feel very grateful to the life that made me understand that my path was another ».

In this work she is often found with her loved ones: her sister, her partner, the director Saverio Costanzo, now her friend Jasmine Trinca. Such as?
«It is beautiful: it puts me in the privileged position of wandering in artistic research without any fear. And then it is important to find someone who tells you the truth, in sincerity there is the possibility to improve and also to accept being imperfect ».

Are you concerned in the movies?
“I don’t like doing it, I’m a very strict judge of myself. As a girl I was almost paralyzing severity, over time I am learning to love myself a little more. Difficult thing for me ».

Because?
“I’ve always been hard on myself.”

Don’t the awards help?
«I learned that it is nice when recognition arrives, but that you also have to know how to do without. And I also learned to rejoice: the right to rejoice if something beautiful arrives ».

Do you feel good?
“The others should say that, really. Sometimes, but not always, I feel I have inhabited that person and that character ».

Even Meryl Streep said she admires her, citing her after Silvana Mangano and Anna Magnani.
«Incredible… Do you think that that day I was on a flight to Morocco where I was shooting a French film, and as soon as I landed and turned on my mobile phone, I received 250 messages. I thought a tragedy had happened. ‘

Instead they were the compliments of the best actress in the world.
“Already. Incredible huh? ».

Photo by Joseph Cardo. Report by Gaia Fraschini.

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