From True Love (1989) to Union Square (2011): Recovering the Exploded Family in Nancy Savoca’s Films

The truism according to which women film directors are not given the same opportunities as their male counterparts is easily extensible to all male-dominated fields and could be even truer—as the author of this chapter argues—if a woman director’s ethnic background places her in a subordinate position in her culture of origin. Even more so, if that perception is confirmed by films that depict a kind of masculinity that glorifies violence and relegates women to either the domestic sphere or the role of wanton seductresses, as mafia movies do. Several Italian American women filmmakers opt for a disavowal of their ethnicity to prove their worth, regardless of how Italian-sounding their last names are. Some filmmakers have, instead, opted to embrace and portray their heritage on film. Most notably Nancy Savoca, Helen De Michiel, and Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno have confronted stereotypes about Italian families and have taken issues with traditional interpretations of women’s roles either debunking them or showing how Italian Americanness is just one extra element in the depiction of universal women’s realities. This chapter focuses on Nancy Savoca, who has directed several films that look at ethnicity (Italian American, or of women from South American countries) as a fundamental element of the development of her characters that aims at depicting the struggles of all women (regardless of ethnicity) to find their places and voices in American society. Career women, mothers, brides, daughters, nuns, servants, ‘dogs’, entrepreneurs, or ditzes, according to the author, Savoca’s women find, in their very fragility, the strength to try to redefine their roles.