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The Lost Women of Goncharov

Listen i love Katya and Sofia as well as anyone, but can we talk about Luciana and Mariella for a minute? The Lost Women of Goncharov. They exist solely as plot devices to further the downward spiral between Andrey and Goncharov and yet haunt the whole script....without Luciana almost none of the action in the film would take place, she is fundamental, yet we know nothing about her. Not a single picture or relic. She’s not even credited with a surname despite the plot importance of her being Mario Ambrosini’s wife....And Mariella. She only ever exists in the background, is dead by the end of the second act, but her relationship with Mario (which is shown only through implications: her pouring his drink for him at the poker game, the way they are always looking at one another in the few scenes they are in, despite never sharing a word) underscores the entire falling apart of the wider male unit of characters. 

Between them, these two women represent an antithesis to the central theme of the story. Goncharov, both the character and the film, are obsessed with time and how little of it we have - how the clock strikes for everyone, and once your time is up, it's up - and yet Luciana and Mariella represent the fact that time does in fact go on. Luciana dies, is a faded echo of a memory, and still permeates the motivations of the living characters. They kill for her, they die for her, her name is repeated and repeated and repeated. Andrey and Goncharov and Ice Pick Joe and Valery Michailov are caught up in their own maddening little torture spiral, becoming less and less aware of the rest of the world, but the rest of the world goes on. Mariella and Mario have an affair or a friendship or a something, almost ignorant of the danger they are in, simply because of this fact: The World Goes On. And yes, obviously, you could just say they’re weakly written female characters who got fridged to further male character development because of misogyny in the film-making industry in the seventies....but I just think that they’re actually very subversive characters and that’s a fact worth recognising

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