Italie, 1938. Léa, closing on 60, seems like the ideal hostess. A Napolitan emigrated to the North, she vows an immoderate love to her sole remaining son, and invites her friends for tea and offers them her homemade soap, that so well softens the skin. But this respectability is only a front...

Inspired by the case of Leonarda Cianculli, nicknamed "the saponifier of Corregio", a serial killer who rose to fame in the 40s, Black Journal  is a venomous satire doubling as a genre film flirting with giallo. This portrait of a hag with an uncurable disorder, this dark vision of a past era, this  macabre comedy tinted with discreet melancholy, deploys before our incredulous eyes a series of outrageous and improbable situations and demented sequences in a carnavalesque spirit close to the commedia dell'arte. Subtle Mauro Bolognini distances himself from his more refined films to wallow in this grotesque unsettling farce, dominated by the impressive presence of Shelley Winters, who brings this decadent masterpiece its necessary excess.