Marine Area: “More needs to be done on the narrative of disability in cinema”

I never want anyone to tell me I’m a who judge books by their covers, and this is why before expressing myself on something I always reserve the right to enjoy it in its entirety. It is also true, however, that by now I have seen so many products steeped in disability stereotypes that it takes very little for me to understand when I am faced with one of these.

In recent days I have seen the film by Riccardo Milani, I run to youremake of the French Tout le monde debout by Franck Dubosc, with Pierfrancesco Favino and Miriam Leone.

The protagonist of the film is Gianni (Pierfrancesco Favino), a womanizer and indifferent man in his fifties, owner of an important brand of running shoes, who for a series of circumstances he finds himself pretending to be disabled in order to get a womanChiara (Miriam Leone), who is disabled for real.

I run to you is a comedy that wants to focus its comedy on the narrative expedient of pretending to be disabled and its related rather ridiculous curtains that follow. The central heart of the film, however, is based on a very common trope: the woman (in this case also disabled) who manages to redeem the asshole man on duty, a mechanism already proposed in her time by Carlo Verdone with Let’s lose sightwith the writing of the character of Asia Argento much more interesting than that of Miriam Leone, especially if contextualized to the period.

If the intent is to offer a positive representation of disability, I run to you does not reach the goal. It is quite evident that the film shows us an external point of view, and not only for the fact that Miriam Leone is not a disabled actress, but for the entire development of the plot and the dynamics that exist between the two protagonists.

Although the character of Gianni, for the purposes of the narrative path, is deliberately built to be a cynical and opportunistic person with a very bad vision of disability, Chiara for the entire duration of the film continue to agree to hang out with him despite the fact that he immediately understood that his disability is a sham.

“For a woman like her, optimism is that love lasts as long as possible, for me to arrive”, these are the words that Chiara uses to describe love while talking to Luciana, one of Gianni’s employees, a moment that in my opinion it subsumes the most problematic aspects of the film. It is by no means excluded that there are disabled women with such thoughts, also because all this has a name: it is called internalized skill. That is, it means introjecting a negative vision of one’s disabled body, adopting an external perspective, not being able to consider disability part of one’s identity, claiming pride in it. In Chiara’s case this translates into conviction of not deserving love as a disabled woman.