The film

The tragedy is there, with the full weight of its merciless and explosive impact. It is there with all its protagonists. For a start there are the murderous mothers, the ones who have sullied themselves with the most atrocious and inconceivable crime, the very ones who are (often) dismayed by the great void they have created and which they survey with stupefaction. Behind and all around them are those who in different ways – often with obstinate immobility and looking the other way – have “helped” them commit the act that brought them to the penitential psychiatric hospital of Castiglione delle Stiviere, where Fabrizio Cattani’s film takes place. Lastly, there are the victims, the killed children that they had carried for nine months, given birth to and, in many cases, loved so much. The presence of the children is one that returns constantly in the accounts of the women of Maternity Blues. In the flash-backs (measured and monstrous), but above all in the daily evocation (“I miss him or her”) of such different mothers, linked together only by the atrocious thread of a terribly mistaken decision. The tone of the film is bare, bleak: a choice that brings out even more the colours of  a childhood that we could all, at least a little, have saved.