L'amore molesto

Psychological drama based on a novel by Elena Ferrante, in which a hectic Naples portrays the conscious and above all unconscious feelings of a woman. The woman is Delia (played by Anna Bonaiuto), who returns to Naples after the mysterious death of Amalia, her mother. Amalia was found almost naked in the sea; she was only wearing erotic lingerie. Delia has been ashamed of her mother for years and is now ashamed of the way she died. Nevertheless she becomes increasingly fascinated by her mother's fate. She tries to find out who was with her in her last hours. Slowly but surely Delia becomes obsessed by her reconstructions of the fatal events. The picture of her mother as an ambivalent, dissatisfied woman, who became involved in affairs despite strict monitoring by her jealous husband, cannot be maintained. Delia's fantasies become increasingly intertwined with memories of her youth. The writer Ferrante, a fairly mysterious hermit who lives in Greece, wrote a book not without mystery itself. The Napolitan film-maker Martone felt especially gripped by the image she created of his home town and saw it as a challenge to translate the distorted portrayal of a woman into a cinematographic form. Martone chose to approach all the mystery as concretely as possible.