From the Berlinale, and endorsed by the prize that the festival gives to the most outstanding series, ‘The Good Mothers’ has arrived at Disney+, an Italian-British production that, based on the book by Alex Perry of the same title, collects the story of three women born into the ‘Ndrangheta (the Calabrian mafia) who dared to stand up to the criminal system to which they were subjected. Denise Cosco, Giuseppina Pesce and Concetta Cacciola are the three women who, accompanied by a fourth heroine, the prosecutor Anna Colace, were able to confront their own families.
Denise is the daughter of Lea Garofalo, the first good mother, the woman who testified seven years ago against her husband, Carlo Cosco, and who has lived on the run ever since. Fed up with continuing to hide with her daughter, she accepts an attempt at reconciliation and forgiveness from her husband: she needs to take her word for it to get her life back, to give Denise a normal adolescence. . But Lea, after going to dinner with Carlo, disappears. On the other hand, Giuseppina and her friend Concetta have their husbands in jail, and both are ignored, mistreated and humiliated by their respective fathers, brothers and cousins (that is, by all the men in their families) to unbearable extremes. . Nor do they find any comfort in the rest of the women that surround them: in the best of cases, they are silent in fear; at worst, they imitate those abusive behaviors.
claustrophobic system
The series, divided into six episodes, delights in showing us how these women live locked up in a claustrophobic system in which at sixteen they try to marry you so that a man controls you, in which an innocent post on Facebook triggers a colossal beating, where a made-up face causes you to be locked in your room, where a comment ends up with your face smashed into a plate of food. Inside their houses, their lives are hell; outside of them, everyone watches them. For this reason, when the astute prosecutor Anna Colace sees in the need of these women to escape their destiny an opportunity to make a breach in the ‘Ndrangheta and put an end to it, the viewer understands perfectly that Denise, Giuseppina and Concetta, even putting in risk their own lives, are willing to testify against their loved ones to end their suffering and prevent their children from suffering the same fate.
Definitely, ‘The Good Mothers’ is not one of those stories that have contributed to stylizing violence to the rhythm of opera and turning the gangster into an idealized male model, a guy with principles and values. That’s what they do in ‘The Godfather,’ and for that we adore her, as do real mobsters. On the other hand, it is more than doubtful that they like ‘The good mothers’, just as they will not like other series as stark as ‘Gomorrah’ or ‘Suburra’. But, unlike the previous ones, ‘The good mothers’ is not led by the betrayals, the fights and the revenge between the men who are part of the mafia clans, but by the women who are suffocated and subdued by them. The miniseries is a cruel, dirty, dark and genuinely Calabrian story (the British writing, production and direction does not detract from its authenticity) about abusive men and women who become victims. That is the main novelty of the series: putting the focus on women, the great forgotten ones, those who, in this type of fiction, have always been turned into mere extras. And it is not little.
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