The purpose of this post is to provide clarification on B-Happy as well as a correction. First, the clarification: Katy was raped off camera (1:05) by her mother’s boss who, as we know, is also her teacher’s husband. This detail appears to have escaped many of the students as first-time viewers, perhaps because it was not explicitly shown. Katy’s mother is also abused by the same man in what, at first glance, might appear to be a consensual relationship. However, his role as her boss, and her body language, suggest that this is not a secret love affair but rather a relationship arising from coercion. Now the correction: I said in class that the film never moves from the individual to the collective, as we saw at the end of Bicycle Thieves. However, Katy’s brief stint as a sex worker puts her in proximity to other women and girls whose situations, while unknown to us as viewers, undoubtedly have at least one commonality with Katy’s: poverty. Herein lies the originality of B-Happy as a neorealist film: it explores poverty in relation to women and girls. (I am not aware of any other neorealist film that does this.) As an exploration of poverty in relation to women and girls, the film suggests a complex correlation between poverty and sexual violence, and Katy’s circumstances constitute only one possible scenario.
on this note, Katy’s abandonment leads her to look for support from two adults that she sees as close family friends and who she naturally trusts. Through the character of the store owner, the film conveys a scathing critique of a patriarchal order where sexual violence is normalized (the man is unrepentant when finally confronted by his wife). The character of Chemo offers some balance to the depiction of masculinity and a tinge of hope for his generation. Like with Los olvidados, B-Happy portrays sexual violence as something that is endemic to poverty. In this way, the film lives up to Zavattini’s conviction that cinema must confront social issues directly, writing that, “A starving man, a humiliated man, must be shown by name and surname; no fable of a starving man, because that is something else, less effective and less moral” (53). B-Happy does exactly that: Katy’s dad looks at her in one scene and tells her, with great pride, that she is a ‘Marklovich’, she is ‘Katy Marklovich’. I can only assume that this is done with purpose.
I want to stress, at this juncture, that B-Happy comes as close to fulfilling Zavattini’s vision of neorealism as can be reasonably expected. It is a film that aspires to present the viewer with an uncomfortable social reality. How effectively and accurately it does this, of course, is debatable. An objective assessment would require doing some academic research.
In closing, I want to make one observation about the title. Katy’s teacher knew about her husband’s behavior (this is suggested when she finally confronts him after he rapes Katy). In light of this, her motto, be happy, can be understood as something of a survival mechanism and heroic act of volition. Her message to her students is really something along the lines of, “never let anyone take away your happiness”; since she is talking to children, she has to say it in a more positive way, and in any event, it had a consequential effect on Katy. It might be argued that as a result of Katy taking this lesson to heart, she began a process of acquiring agency and developing resilience.
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