Shady Women in Post-War Italian Cinema

This essay aims to investigate the shady women of neorealist cinema by focusing on all the elements that compose the form that they assume on screen (through the characters’ typecasting, physiognomy, the actresses’ performances). The ambiguity of these characters is noticeable in stories of misrecognition, belated acknowledgements, terrible jealousies, crimes of passion, grandiloquent suicides. For them the past never passes (and unfortunately it comes back). The purpose of this chapter is thus to identify the image that they conjure up in the tradition of Italian film and national history.