Volti del nostro tempo. L'opposizione tra self made women e vagabonde

This article is on some faces that symbolically represent a particularly meaningful way to make sense of our lives nowadays. Starting from what critics say about the resemblance of the faces of the main characters of the movies La vie d’Adéle – Capitres 1 & 2 and Jeune Femme to ours, a reflection is carried out on the narrative structure of their stories and on how it differs from other ways of telling stories, like for example the one of Chiara Ferragni, the famous influencer, in her biopic movie Chiara Ferragni – Unposted. Even if the latter is a documentary, it is in fact defined by many other critics as a deceptive fairy tale, while the former movies, which are fictitious, are interpreted as a sort of a precise photograph of the reality we live in. To explain these interpretations, a hypothesis is advanced: that La vie d’Adéle – Capitres 1 & 2 and Jeune Femme on one side, and Chiara Ferragni – Unposted on the other, derive from two different cultural models, the one of vagabonds and the one of self made women, that are logically opposed and that interact every time we must tell, today, the meaning of our experience of life. To demonstrate it, such cultural models are described, connecting the movies that represent them with other texts, like sociological essays, travel diaries, journalistic inquiries that – even if talking about different characters and situations – seem to tell the same stories. The research that is presented here is also an occasion to reflect on sociosemiotics and its methods to find out and describe the collective cultural models we recur to, to share a common vision of the world. In particular, it is shown that the narrative structures of La vie d’Adéle – Capitres 1 & 2, Jeune Femme and Chiara Ferragni – Unposted derive in turn from some “amodal” ways of connecting things and concepts, that are, in a sense, the root of our convictions about how reality is nowadays.