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The Ambivalence of the Stranger and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (1998)

2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2021.1996309

1543-5326

Gregoria Manzin, Mark Nicholls,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

In this article we consider the continuing film history of mass migration into Italy through the story of one such East African migrant, Shandurai (Thandie Newton), as it is represented in Bernardo Bertolucci 's Besieged (1998).In Shandurai we see the mysteries of a Roman extracomunitaria, who cleans the house of a musician, becomes dux of her medical class and falls in love with her employer, while being constantly bombarded by alternatively disturbing and comforting dreams of the beauty and dictatorial corruption of both her East African homeland and her new home.Recent literature addressing people movement within and between Europe and Africa has made much of the notion of ambivalence.In this context, ambivalence covers a range of experiences, largely clustering around personal struggles over freedom and guilt relating to home and family obligations.Considering these ideas of ambivalence in relation to Freud's interest in the topic and the work Julia Kristeva, we establish a similar narrative designed to account for the representation of the looking back and forward migrant subjectivity which sits at the heart of this film.Enduring the migrant's reluctant extrication from trauma, forced redefinition of home and family relations, and reciprocated feelings of hostility, admiration and love towards her hosts, Shandurai performs such a Januslike ambivalence.This cinematic ambivalence, we argue, is central to understanding contemporary migrant experience both in Italy and beyond. 'What do you know about Africa?'Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.Hamlet (1.5,164-165) Besieged begins with what appears to be a dream of Africa (Sklarew 2000, 260).A storyteller sings to camera and he will continue throughout this prologue of orphanages and hospitals and the propaganda activities of an unspecified military regime.A woman cycles along a road that leads to a primary school where a man teaches the children about the difference between a boss and a leader.Almost instantly, the lesson is interrupted by just such a business-suited boss, bursting into the classroom with a posse of soldiers who rough-handle the teacher and take him away.This happens before the eyes of the woman who breaks down in anguish on the roadside beside the storyteller.He walks by, still singing, seemingly indifferent to her trauma.Whether the space is filled by a little sleep or by, what might be described as, 'a lifetime', the same woman, Shandurai (Thandie Newton), wakes as if from a disturbing dream.Very gradually, depending on the audience member's familiarity with the city and how much of a stranger they are, it becomes clear that the action is now set in Rome.Shandurai is a medical student who lives in the basement of a house on the Vicolo del Bottino, off the Piazza di Spagna and its tourist-renowned Spanish Steps.Shandurai cleans this house for a man, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis), who is a talented pianist and composer.These two perform a sort of a cat and mouse routine up and down the Hitchcockian spiral staircase of the building (Kehr 1999, 6-7).This balletto is accompanied by their competing musical expressions; Shanduari's African and African influenced cds for Kinsky's jazz inflected modernist piano playing, and by her intermittent, ambivalent reveries of the Africa she has left behind.Kinsky frustrates and disturbs Shandurai through the apparent unintelligibility of his music and by sending her gifts: