The painterly clouds of a Tuscan sky hover above Maremma’s rolling landscape. On a rock sits a handbag. A white Miu Miu Wander bag. Upon close inspection, though, we see it’s dirty, beaten up, weathered with time. What has this handbag been through? And how did it end up here, alone? In Autobiografia di una Borsetta, we watch and listen to this handbag recount its life story, from birth to old age. It’s a life spanning a multitude of discrete socially encoded spaces — ultramodern factory, sprawling Italian villa, impoverished urban peripheries — and a spectrum of owners, from privileged teenage daughter to working class assassin. In this story, the Wander bag is the silent main character around which contemporary Italy teams with joy, sadness, desperation and desire. It is an object that is the heroine — not only of this film, but in many of our own lives.
