There is an image that is enough to start everything: a girl with a suitcase, in front of a door that does not recognize, in the dusty heat of a summer of province. It is the mother scene of L’Arminuta, a word of Abruzzo that means the girl brought back, the one that is returned. And in that verb, to return, there is already the heart of the novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio and the film by Giuseppe Bonito: a life moved without immediate explanations, inside a world where love is never simple and belonging is a burning question.
The novel puts the reader in direct contact with the tear and confusion of those who are eradicated by a family and deposited in another. It does not look for consoling shortcuts: poverty is not a picturesque background, but a concrete condition that weighs on everyday gestures and the possibilities of choice. When Bonito brings history to the cinema in 2021, the challenge is similar: how to translate on the screen a pain made of silences, shame, material hunger and affective hunger? The film’s response is a fidelity that is not only about events, but above all the atmosphere. The adaptation chooses not to tame the matter, and to make the viewer feel the same cruelty that in the book is entrusted to the essential words and the emotions held.
The most obvious and most devastating common point is the double abandonment. The protagonist grew up in the city in a relatively busy life, with neat habits and a future that seems already written. Then, without notice, it is reported to the biological family in a rural context where everything is narrower: spaces, bodies, possibilities. This return is not just a change of home, it is a change of world. And what makes the wound even deeper, in both works, is that long no precise reason is offered. The absence of an explanation becomes traumatic trauma: not only to be moved, but to be excluded from the sense of its history. The novel and the film, choosing this perspective, force those who read and who look to share the disorientation, to feel a guest in a family where every gesture seems to have an undeclared code.
In the center, both on the page and on the screen, there is also the division between two maternal figures, treated with the same painful delicacy. The adoptive mother represents a more composed cure, almost “educated”, made of attentions and habits that seem natural until they are lost. The biological mother often appears as an emotional enigma: a hard, tired woman, compressed by a life of necessity, who struggles to transform affection into words or reassuring gestures. The film retains this ambiguity without turning any of the two into a character to be condemned or idealized. History suggests that, even before people, it is the social environment to distribute roles: poverty, shame, lack of alternatives. This sobriety, common to novel and film, prevents the drama from slipping into the melodrama.
If there is an element that combines novel and films in an almost structural way, it is the link between sisters. The protagonist does not immediately find a “family” in the reassuring sense of the term; rather finds a concrete complicity, and often imperfect, with Adriana. The sisterhood here is not romantic, born from forced cohabitation and from a closeness that at first weighs: a shared bed, disputed objects, confidences thrown there between fatigue and others. Yet, just inside that roughness, a powerful feeling grows, because it is made of protective gestures when no one else really knows how to protect. The film enhances this dynamic with great attention to the bodies and silences, making visible the affection that in the novel often lives undergoing.
The language also becomes a clear bridge between the two versions. In the novel the Abruzzo dialect is a sign of belonging and, together, of distance: it is the immediate proof that the girl is not “of there”, that she must learn a world that never taught her how to work. On the screen that language becomes sound and rhythm, and amplifies the feeling of extraneity. It is not a folkloric detail: is a narrative element that marks the hierarchy, shame, alliances. The choice of the film to resound the spoken one, without making it neutral or softening it, strengthens continuity with the novel and its idea of truth.
Ambientation also contributes to the likeness: both works recreate a provincial Italy in the 1970s, where the border between the city and the countryside is almost a class boundary. The city is order and comfort; the campaign is need, overcrowding, lack of privacy, a daily life in which everything is counted. The film reconstructs this climate through places and atmospheres that restore the feeling of a lateral world, far from well-being, where modernity arrives attenuated and fatigue still dictates the rhythm of days.
In the end, the comparison between novel and film is not played on “photographic” fidelity, but on a deeper fidelity: the one to wound and resistance. In both cases a girl is pushed from a comfortable life to a foreign and difficult universe; in both cases pain does not melt with a simple revelation, but with a slow learn to stay in the world; in both cases family love is not a starting point, it is a daily work, made of friction and sudden tenderness. The Arminuta remains, both in the form of a novel and in the form of a film, a story of subjugated restitution and of conquered reconstruction, where identity is not something that is found, but something that is seized.
Article <i>L’Arminuta</i>, from page to screen: the same wound, the same stubborn tenderness comes from IlNewyorkese.
