Vierge sous serment

This movie based on a book by Elvira Dones depicts a society with very strict rules for its women. They don't have rights to take any decisions and have to live under the restrictive rules of the patriarchal society. However, there is a provision, to avoid living under male guardianship, women can vow to remain a virgin forever and live as a man. This story follows one such woman who decided to live as a man. She today lives as Mark in the mountain village, alone, without any social contacts and without any sense of belonging even after spending her whole life there. Mark decides to visit his sister, who long back ran away from the village long back and today lives with her husband and teen-aged daughter in Milan. Witnessing a society where women are given freedom to do everything and live with independence, Mark undergoes a journey of recounting the instances in her teenage that prompted her to live as a man. The movie is the journey Mark takes to find and accept her femininity.

In Albania, young Hana follows an ancient custom that allows her to live as a man. She does this to escape the restrictions and dangers girls in her society face. However, despite the freedom and rights she gets as a man, she is also expected to forego love in any form. After ten years she moves to Italy to join her family-and begins to wonder what being a woman in a more tolerant country would be like. This film moves slowly. It isn't for you if you are looking for adventure and action. But if you enjoy the spectacular beauty of nature and a plot that involves a woman's awakening to who she really is, then you will enjoy "Sworn Virgin."

Herculine Barbin, a French hermaphrodite wrote "Oh, to live alone, always alone, in the midst of crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me!" Michel Foucault, in his reading of Barbin's memoir asked whether we need a " true sex", whether sex should be fixed and determined fits the intersex medical and personal debates (whose decision and why make a drastic one to clearly orgsnise sex and gender at birth) Decisions made for people invalidate them, confine them to constricted occupations of space that for some are impossible to feel and think as freedom. This film explored love, gender and what it means to feel freedom.

Laura Bispuri's has a very clear intent in her debut feature Vergine guirata and the director sets about delivering its theme in the most direct way possible; consequently it's one that doesn't have much time for poetic observations or even an openness that might allow the spectator to meet it half-way.

There's perhaps not much room for open interpretation anyway in the case of how life is for women living in a remote village in northern Albania. Hana (Alba Rohrwacher) has been taken in by a family there, but seems determined to follow her own path, rejecting the restrictions that have been placed on the work that women can do and even on who they choose to love. Her friend/ adopted sister Lila has found this lifestyle impossible and has left the region to marry and live in Italy. Hana has taken an even more drastic step and chosen the way of the tradition of burmesha (sworn virgin), renouncing her female identity to live as a man.

Hana, under her male identity as Mark, has now also found that it is time to leave her Albanian home and goes to find her sister by adoption in Rome. Still living and dressing as a man - the masculine identity of Mark left ambiguous but only for someone who don't know Alba Rohrwacher - it takes some while for Hana to rediscover herself, and inevitably, having lived as a 'sworn virgin', there are some issues to be resolved within herself with regards to her sexuality, which is assailed by sensations at the swimming pool where her niece is training as a synchronised swimmer.

Learning to become a woman again is certainly a unique subject for a film, but essentially Vergine guirata is just another spin on the idea of identity, on learning to feel comfortable with your own sexuality and who you are. It is very simple and direct on those terms, and it seems to borrow something from Celine Schiamma's Water Lilies in how it relates those themes to synchronised swimming. Even though it is straightforward in its theme and focusses on the unique situation of Hana/Mark, Bispuri's film does take a few moments out to linger over a variety of bodies at the poolside to suggests that there is more than one choice available, and that we are all free to control who it is we want to be.