The short movie For I Am Dead, by Patricia Delso Lucas, is an identity drama. A tortuous journey in the chiaroscuro of consciousness. We are at the end of the 19th century, Oscar is a middle-aged nobleman who fanatically lives, like the historical period to which he belongs, a phase of unbridled self-aggrandisement, an obsessive search for pleasure at all costs, for existential exhaustion, which ends hide, as in a purgatory d'Annunzio, the seeds of an increasingly imminent moral and civil decadence - the Bella Epoque would have been, moreover, only an illusory bridge towards modernity. His villa, a gigantic refuge for a lost soul, almost seems to imprison him like a huge cage that separates him from the outside world and from his own interiority. Pleasure, for Oscar, is in short an act of nihilism, of destruction of the self, of drowning, of a terminal game with which the only awareness acquired is concluded: the impossibility of knowing/accepting oneself fully. The outside world, in that particular historical moment and by extension still today, seems to force the subject not to be able to be himself, to never be able to truly discover himself. The subject is, etymologically, subiectum, that is, subject, slave of an obscure system, and not really an individual, a single, unique and inimitable being, free from socially pre-established categories. Then comes Jude, the young gardener, and suddenly everything seems to change. Bearer of an archaic, wild and feminine beauty at the same time, Jude is, at the same time, a kind young man and a demon ready to unleash hell. "I know who you are. I know what you are. You are death, the devil, Lucifer. You are here to tempt me and stir up my sins,” says Oscar. A duality masterfully expressed in the film both on a purely narrative level, with Oscar's eyes discovering a new boundary of love and projecting it onto Jude, looking at him in a deformed mirror that always doubles his personality in both directions, towards the light or towards the shadow, both on a strictly cinematographic level, with the unusual use of sound, sometimes synchronously, others asynchronously, as in the more experimental Godard, precisely to underline that sense of duplicity. As the director states: "Seen through Oscar's eyes, Jude's character embraces a duality between the gentle, dutiful young man he really is and the devil, the grotesque deformation Oscar projects upon him as a result of his tortured soul." Oscar thus passes, in a very short time, from the sudden discovery of the self that he had always repressed to the inability to separate the real from the unreal, the true from the illusory. From a psychoanalytical point of view, this would be the natural consequence of mirroring: once one's identity has been re-discovered, the world around us, precisely because it is substantially adverse to this revelation, begins to blur, to then deform and finally liquefy or end up in flames. It is the fate of Oscar, and, on closer inspection, of his era and his class of belonging, the aristocracy, which, precisely at that historical juncture, definitively entered into agony. There is a whole literature and cinematography about it, from Renoir to Visconti, and yet, For I Am Dead, has the great merit of moving away from the easier quotations, of seeking its own path, focusing on the psychological complexity of the two protagonists, and thus succeeding to obtain a final result of great narrative and cinematographic value: to tell at the same time the late romantic decadence of a precise historical moment and the universality of the theme of identity, of the revelation/acceptance of what we are, of the impossibility of living it freely. With studied baroque, misty and spectral photography, with a series of very close-ups that almost seem to compose a Stanislavskian study, the short movie takes us theatrically – the angles of the shots strongly underline the inspiration from the theater – adrift that awaits the protagonist, madly in love with new love, rejected, rejected, drowned in the flames of Hell. “Finally I'm free – says Oscar – I'm finally myself. And there's nothing more to fear because I'm dead." As in a Foscolo drama or in the most classic of Faust, love and beauty produce only death and despair. But the aspiration to a different world is strong: where everyone can be free to live their dormant identity, to express the depth of their feelings, to be reborn in a wireless body, detached from dogmas and categories.