When last we left the Gossip Girl-like lives of Chiara Altieri (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Ludovica (Alice Pagani), they had gotten in too deep at Mirage, the nightclub that fronts for Saverio’s (Paolo Calabresi) prostitution ring. Only Saverio is getting too unbearable to work for–not that his right-hand henchman, Fiore (Giuseppe Maggio), is much better. The only real difference between them being that Fiore has yet to employ violence (though that could change at any moment if there’s a season three) to go with his undiluted manipulation.
And even if Ludo briefly believes Fiore’s interest in her is a pure form of love, she comes to find that there is a distinction between a healthy relationship and the one between a prostitute and her pimp (and, in season two, student and teacher). The only one who seems capable of genuine affection in the series is Damiano Younes (Riccardo Mandolini), the erstwhile reluctant boyfriend of Camilla (Chabeli Sastre Gonzalez), who ends up going to America as she had always planned to with Chiara, the latter deciding to stay in Rome at the end of season one and striking up a romance with Damiano for added back-stabbing flair (but it’s fine because Camilla is generally an insufferable cunt rag and unfortunately returns in season two). It is, indeed, Damiano’s predilection for emotional involvement that causes him to crash Saverio’s car as he’s driving it in order to protect Ludo from his rape-veering abuse. His death after some fatal injuries is merely the ciliegia on top of Ludo and Chiara’s ability to sever all ties to the operation. Alas, incriminating evidence still abounds in the form of Brando (Mirko Trovato), who has snapped a plethora of photos (in addition to just mentally snapping) of Ludo with Fiore after being jilted by the former. So naturally, Brando’s blackmailing role ramps up considerably as season two progresses.
So, too, does the inherent nature of the Italian view of women as being either whorish or virginal. Chiara, who has managed to keep her predilection for ho’ing for pay more under wraps than Ludo (already a pariah in season one for having a sex tape), is the manifestation, particularly for Damiano, of “virtue.” That she has a not so secret relishment of having sex with gross older Italian men for money is nothing if not ironic. As though she has a latent desire to defile herself so that she can at last shatter the image that both Damiano and her parents have created. Some tinselly vision of an angel, complete with blonde hair to match the false projection. One she never asked for, nor wanted to adhere to. Yet the pressure to do so remains a great weight on her shoulders as she struggles with the dichotomy of being the “perfect girl” in one facet of her life and a literal whore in another. A realm she starts to prefer as season two goes on and she allows herself to easily get pulled back into Fiore’s racket as her alter ego, “Emma.” Of course, she claims she’s doing it for Damiano’s welfare, to extricate him from this dark underworld he’s been pulled into as a result of needing to pay off his debt for killing Saverio. But it’s not difficult to see that she gets off on having such power over these men, something Natalia (Gomorra’s Denise Capezza) calls her out for on Halloween (in the episode, “Ghosts”) when she shows up at a glossy hotel bar to sub for Ludo after she flakes out on arriving to bang an important politician. And who can blame Ludo for being slightly less into the trade these days? Between being harassed by an obsessive creep with a corgi and being stiffed out of three hundred euros in the commencing “#justagame” episode as a result of not having a pimp to beat cash out of people when necessary. She seems to be getting over it just as Chiara is renewing her fervor for the “secret life” that comes with being a teenage prostitute.
But Natalia doesn’t abide being a whore for novelty’s sake. Thus she approaches Chiara at the party with distaste, demanding, “Why are you working as a whore? I do it for the money, which I need. But why are you doing it? I’ll tell you why. You like it, don’t you? You like feeling in control. That you can do whatever you please. It makes you feel powerful.” Any such feeling is summarily stripped when Brando films Chiara fucking the brains out of said politician. A video that forces Chiara to dump Damiano and pose as Brando’s girlfriend at a time when the school is hot on his trail for being gay after Fabio (Brando Pacitto) angrily graffitis, succinctly, “Brando Gay” on the front of Collodi’s entrance in retaliation for Brando treating their undercover dalliance like nothing.
Niccolò (Lorenzo Zurzolo), Camilla’s brother who was briefly allowed entry into Chiara before she got over it (though he never really did), is surprisingly non-bullying about this implication, which comes as a shock considering the duo’s favorite pastime is abusing trans prostitutes in a particular pocket of Rome. In fact, Niccolò has the most abrupt and unlikely character arc out of everyone in Baby’s second season, in keeping with the two-dimensional notion of women as the cut and dried tropes of Madonna or whore in the Italian male mindset. For why can’t Chiara and Ludo change by the end? Instead, they seem more mired in Fiore’s clutches than ever. Because once an Italian girl goes down the puttana path, she can no longer be deemed pure again–so she might as well go whole hog, so to speak.
As Chiara phrases it in season two’s first episode, “When something new begins, we feel a shiver down our spine. There’s nothing more beautiful than that moment. That’s what adolescence is like. A continuous discovery… While there’s something to discover, everything still seems possible.” The underlying meaning, of course, also being applicable to the salacious Italian men who are her clients; men who only like to discover a woman’s vag when it’s still new, not overly used (that is to say, seasoned). For there is something attractive about that in-between phase of a girl segueing from virgin to whore. The perfect Goldilocks middle ground that so ephemerally exists in the appraisal of sexualized women. Particularly in Italian culture.
