Chi l’ha vista? Reflections on the Montesi Case

Abstract

The Montesi scandal, sometimes called “the first modern mediatic case,” centers on the disappearance and death of a young Roman woman from the ceti medi (middle classes), a woman of no particular importance, a ragazza qualunque (Any-girl). In my book on the scandal, I have argued that the case cannot be known outside of the cinema of the period, and in the following brief essay I develop more precisely my thinking on the relationship of filmic narrative to questions of disappearance, (true) crime, justice, and closure.¹ Justice for the “forgotten,” as Giorgio Agamben describes in The Idea of Prose is a tradition, a voice, rather than a form of revenge or a definitive endpoint. Such an idea of justice goes toward accounting for the explosion of narratives and films, especially in Italian culture, that attempt to rewrite (or re-cinematize) unresolved (and ultimately unresolvable) cases and mysteries from the past.² In real life, families seek “closure,” even if in ending a narrative, or in punishing a criminal, the overall good of society—the Law—is not well served. This is why, for example, a family may bring a civil suit against a defendant in a democracy, outside the horizon of the Law. In fact, the Montesi family did, reluctantly, bring a civil suit that was quickly retracted for complex and contradictory reasons. In the end, the family received neither closure nor justice in the traditional narrative sense.³