«Me and her», five women and their revolutions, represented by five actresses (score 7 and 1/2)- Corriere.it

The series dedicated to the female universe, in the name of five women who have each revolutionized her field, is trivially titled “Me and Her”, like a very old variety of the newborn TV where Taranto and Delia Scala were all the rage. But here, in this interesting production by Sky Arte (also streaming on Now), now in its second season, the I and she refer to the name of the five historical protagonists, one “divine” and four other earthlings, and coupled with the actress who represents her here today, a challenge that pierces the course of time and fashions: in order Carolina Crescentini is Gabriella Ferri, Camilla Filippi is Giulietta Masina, Cristiana Dell’Anna is Tina Modotti, Valeria Bilello is Elsa Schiaparelli, Sonia Bergamasco it’s Isadora Duncan and the latter is the more attractive fusion.

Five protagonists of cultural history: a singer, an Oscar-winning actress, a photographer, a stylist and finally a dancer, each in its own way has revolutionized her era and turned the tables, imposing and anticipating the fashions to come and sometimes paying the bill in person. Let’s say that the best known is Masina, never called Giulietta Fellini who was made immortal by her husband like Gelsomina, Cabiria, Giulietta degli spiriti or Ginger; the most sophisticated is Isadora Duncan, born in San Francisco in 1877 and died in Nice in France, strangled in a car by her long scarf in 1927, as can also be seen in the beautiful film by Karel Reisz dedicated to her and starring Vanessa Redgrave; the most worldly is Elsa Schiaparelli, the first international stylist with physical and psychological headquarters in Paris, loved by Cocteau and Dalì, star of that crazy and wonderful era on the Seine and today she has a niece whose name is Marisa Berenson; the most popular is Ferri, a rough and Roman voice, used to shouting in the alleys of Trastevere but ended up later, out of snobbery, acclaimed by all for her skill often exhibited on TV; the most cultural is Tina Modotti, a world-famous photographer (Cristiana Dell’Anna has the task of illustrating her), a tireless traveler, author of thousands of photos in each of which there was a slice of the world, traveling between Italy (she was born in Udine in 1846, he died in Mexico in ’42), the United States and Germany.

Internationally renowned women who go beyond the limits imposed by the so-called “convenience”. Consider Isadora who considers dance as a kind of sanctification of the female body (“dance and forget”), a highly transgressive performer, endowed with great vital freedom accepted throughout the world because she drew Dionysian inspirations from ancient Greece, suffered the loss of three children and had human contacts with other artists, such as Eleonora Duse. Bergamasco, as a refined actress that she is, courts the character without ever falling into the temptation to completely redo it, but getting closer and further away in equal measure, however giving us, with her mysterious gaze, the keys to interpreting her secrets and hidden modernity (think what would have been a meeting between her and Pina Bausch): Sonia’s veils in the wind are unforgettable. La Masina was everyone’s friend, an apparently simpler character but not fragile as the appearance of a bourgeois wife with the superego of a great actress would suggest, a combination that stays together by a miracle, as in the hypnosis scene of the ” Nights of Cabiria”. Masina was Fellini’s muse, she was Chaplin in a skirt, but Camilla Filippi explains her physicality and the human factor that made her so loved by ordinary people, as well as her temperament as a mother hen in the family, born near Bologna and then became Roman since I was a child without ever losing the love for the roots.

The one that most attempts the identification process, a real siren for the actresses, is Carolina Crescentini who “becomes” also for love Gabriella Ferri, a screamer friend of all “whose broken voice fished in the abyss”, a mix of tears and laughter that breaks the heart, even in interventions by ex-boyfriend friends, such as Renzo Arbore who tells it very truthfully. She was a strong, vital woman capable of getting her hands dirty with everything, while her past time was continually found again.

The series is well done because each installment he has his stop at the costume designer who explains how and why to choose a suitable dress for that personality, then at the make up artist who recommends eye liner and advises how one can sometimes become irresistible with makeup. The least known to those not involved in tailoring was perhaps Elsa Schiaparelli, judged to be the true first stylist in history and very well told, with an investigative attitude, by Valeria Bilello. The fashion artist, very personal in the dynamic structures of the clothes and in their colours, was born in Rome in 1890 and died naturally in Paris in 1973: she is told as an elegant psychologist of the female soul with a true revolution in the way of dressing and then to “appear”.