The “family romance” comes out of the closet: the female fantasy in Sévigné (Julia Berkowitz)

Abstract

This essay tackles the study of Sévigné (Julia Berkowitz) (2004), by the Catalan filmaker Marta Balletbó-Coll, from a feminist perspective that deals with the specific Oedipal transgressions of the film with regard to the classical «Maternal Melodrama». Its peculiarity derives from a «family romance» which moves in the opposite direction of the traditional Melodrama insofar as the drama does not work to repress or redirect the female transgression of the incest taboo carried by the ideological function of the classical Melodrama but to take it out of the closet and reveal an Oedipal triangle marked by the ineffectiveness and progressive exclusion of the Law of the father.

Keywords

• cine de mujeres
• melodrama materno
• romance familiar
• teoría queer
• lógica edípica
• trasgresión femenina