Clichy Editions – 2023
Tonight hell is a crowded apartment building. Whoever inhabits it longs for a love, aches for someone, waits in vain for a nod. Or, worse, he pretends to lead a normal life and in his heart harbors the ghost of a love that was never born. Identical is the refuge: the voice of Mina. Just put on one of his songs, and immediately you feel understood, incredibly described, welcomed and accepted. The conventions of time fall away, and it could be a livid winter afternoon, the kind that follows Christmas jubilation with an almost mournful silence, but it could also be a summer evening, with everyone running toward an impossible joy and you searching for an answer, a meaning, a solution. It could be 2023, but also 1980, 1973. Carmela and Rosanna return to being two girls who lock themselves in the room that saw them as children, and brood over their absent men while listening to Even a Man: He can always have a soul what you know, Mina dear, but ours are terrible. Perhaps that is why we love them. Paul sighs again for that boy who prefers women to him, one in particular, and cannot understand how he can love her since she treats him so badly. How much I would know how to love you, if only you would let me. At this point, viva lei. Marco continues to lambaste between a golden, illusory love and his very long, tired, predictable relationship. “Should I go back to my home?”: the Mina song lends itself to interpreting the question that most troubles him. For all of them, for all of them, the remedy is the same: that voice that comes like a balm, those words that sound like a portrait. For a moment she deludes them that that pain, as she sings it for them, can be endured. For the time of a song, that pain is the most vivid and hottest note of their poor love.
