![The Goddess of Fortune (2019) ( La dea fortuna ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, Blu-Ray, Reg.B Import - Italy ]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31q-H8xX6uS._QL70_ML2_.jpg)
Ferzan Ozpetek is one of the finest living film directors with a distinct style, richly complex, whose work is mostly devoted to what might loosely be called tragicomedies, the light and the dark, the sad and the happy parts of life mingled, in a sense almost inseparable in his movies. La Dea Fortuna is no exception.
I want to quibble with the translation of the title into English as The Goddess of Fortune. The problem lies in the use of the genitive. The Goddess Fortune, as direct a translation as is possible, would have been far more preferable. By saying "of Fortune," the translation implies that the goddess either has control over Fortune or is controlled by it. But neither is true. Fortune is the goddess; the goddess is Fortune. Fortune is simply (and profoundly) a goddess. It is not a matter of "control of" or "power over" or anything like that.
Why does this matter? If Fortune is a goddess, a deity, she is transcendent to human wishes or activity or psychology. This is the pagan, Roman Fortuna, the one invoked at the beginning of Orff's Carmina Burana, for example, a work using poems from the Middle Ages when that sort of paganism endured still, as it does to this day in many places, some surprising.
Another way of approaching Fortuna, not quite accurately, would be to see her as fate or fatality or destiny. (The Italian fatalità is unsurprisingly closest.) And this matters because in the world of Ozpetek's La Dea Fortuna Fortuna is the presiding deity, that is, chance, happenstance, fate, destiny, fatality all at once, embodied in the one sacred presence.
The film itself is mostly concerned with failure: of love, work, ambition, family, friendships, even of life itself. History, memory, personal pasts matter, of course. The main characters are wracked by failures, ever increasingly better understood by all the major adult characters through the film's passages, including how much the past has affected them and will continue to do so.
This is particularly pertinent to the film's first images of two children locked in a room, one of them, the girl, shouting to be freed as the camera scans images of the past inscribed, in a sense, in the walls of an ancestral palace. It is an image that will return importantly, of course, toward the end. The past makes us who we are, especially when it is cruel.
But that fact is a fact that cannot be undone. Human wishes or acts cannot be undone either. No amount of psychological creativity (or therapy) can undo it. In our pasts, as in our presents, as much as anything human beings are in the hands of Fortuna. That does not mean nothing can be done about it; it means there is a limit to what can be done about it. Failure, in this understanding, is inevitable. It belongs as much to the goddess as it does to us.
There is a fable about the goddess that a boy tells early in the film as if from the mouth of La Dea Fortuna: if one looks at someone one loves hard and closes one's eyes and remembers, love cannot be destroyed. It is a strange sort of story to come from Fortuna. It is repeated several times in the movie. The pertinent statue of her is confronted, forcefully, beautifully late in the film. And the movies's final image is of a moment when the two men, whose long marriage seems doomed, and their two new children (the two children of their friend who died and willed them to be their guardians) stare at one another, close their eyes, and begin the long effort of memory.
They do so, in a manner of speaking, in the domain of the goddess, under her authority. It is what saves them, this giving of themselves to the goddess's promise. And therefore it shines a light on what the ending of the film means since it is beyond human ability to save itself; the force of that, and this is left in perhaps a disturbing way unexamined, is indeterminate.
My one big question about Ozpetek's movie, then, is how to understand that final series of images. Undoubtedly it is heartwarming and embracing. But is it also more than slightly sentimental? It would seem to assign memory to Fortune's doings. I am not sure what that means. (This is no place to examine the meanings of memoria or Moneta to the Romans and Mnemosyne to the Greeks.)
But memory is a great sea in which much more is lost or drowns than gets saved. The film itself makes that clear. In brief, the four, in that final series of images, have put their futures, their enduring love, into the order of Fortune, of something greater themselves. The imagery is beautiful. But it is true?
I have never had to ask that question about the ending of a film by Ferzan Ozpetek before. It intrigues me that in this one I do.
