The stranger: Paolo Strippoli's film between control, destiny and desperate love

The Stranger tells the story of Anna Colonna, who suddenly shows up at her daughter Alice's house to tell her the truth about their family. Their story is marked by a pact made many years earlier with a stranger.

A long-kept secret thus comes back to claim its price. The story develops between the present, during a storm, and the summers of the past in which the Colonna family still seemed invincible.

The stranger presents Anna as a mother who wants to have control over the fate of her children. Faced with the frightening randomness of human experience, he entrusts this desire to a woman he knows nothing about. The stranger offers her the chance to decide, but the attempt to protect the one she loves becomes the dark heart of the story.

The film compares two very different dimensions. The present is set in Alice's apartment during a storm, in a closed, cold space besieged by water. The past is instead that of the bright summers of the Colonna family, told through airy and warm places, full of bodies, music and promises.

The director and co-screenwriter, Paolo Strippoli, commented on the film The Stranger as follows: "Anna Colonna visits her daughter Alice and opens a wound that has remained hidden for twenty years, starting a film that is both a confession, a trial in the past and a last, desperate gesture of love. The Stranger tells of a mother who needs to have control over the destiny of her children and, in order not to give up on the idea that this is impossible, she entrusts it to a woman she doesn't know about. nothing. This stranger offers her the chance to decide, and that's all Anna asks for: to be able to defeat the frightening randomness of human experience. The story moves between the present, imprisoned in Alice's apartment during a storm, and the bright summers in which the Colonna family still seems invincible. The aesthetics of the film are built on a clear contrast: on the one hand a closed, cold space besieged by water; on the other, airy and warm places, full of bodies, music and promises.

The spiral is the geometry of the film. It is the image that reminds us of the inevitability of destiny, but also of the structure of the story itself: each chapter is shorter and more excited than the previous one and every choice made by Anna takes her back to the point of origin. I wondered for a long time what the genre of this film was: it is a family saga and a psychological thriller. But it is above all a tragedy, in its Aristotelian definition: a story that arouses pity and terror to lead the spectator to catharsis. Pity and terror, violence and tenderness: for me, the experience of this film arises exactly from their encounter. And finally there is the question that guided me most of all: how much harm can we do by mistaking it for love? In the play of lights and shadows of life, The Stranger inhabits that blind spot in which the desire to protect those we love can transform into the most ferocious way of losing them".