Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2023

[Chris Knipp]

GIANNI AMELIO: LORD OF THE ANTS/IL SIGNORE DELLE FORMICHE (2022)



LUIGI LO CASCIO AND LEONARDO MALTESE IN LORD OF THE ANTS

Lives destroyed by homophobia in Sixties Italy

This complex and interesting though clearly flawed film recreates an important but largely forgotten court case of Italy in the 1960's that delineates the country's uneasy relationship with homosexuality. It features the prolific Luigi Lo Cascio as the accused Aldo Braibanti, an intellectual who at the end of the 1960s was convicted of the crime of "plagio" or grooming of Ettore Tagliaferri, a young man who frequented the Tower, Braibanti's cultural center. As Ettore, there is a stunning performance by newcomer Leonardo Maltese. Counterpoint is provided by an easygoing performance as Unità reporter Ennio Scribani, who covers the case, by Elio Germano.

Lo Cascio, Montese and Germano are compelling and this is a moving, disturbing film. However, as I have learned from Italian sources, notably Raffaele Meale in Quinlan, there are inexplicable alterations and things left out in Gianni Amelio's telling of events. Amelio's freedom with the context of the case - the communist paper's coverage and the support of Braibanti by prominent artists and intellectuals - is hard to understand and creates reservations about the film. So does its style and mood, which is languid and feels rooted in the very backwardness of earlier decades. This film is not quite up to the level of great Amelio work like Così ridevano, Lamerica, and Le chiavi di casa.

But the essential point is clear. Modern Italy, right in the time of worldwide civil rights revolts, was still mired in the fascist aftereffects (Mussolini did not even allow the word "homosexual" to be used because he would not admit there were such people in Italy) and the oppressive "morality" of the Catholic church. Indeed the concept of mentally subjugating another person, designated by the "plagio" law only evoked then and never again, was not just a backward idea but a positively medieval, as well as fascist one, and this was the summer of 1968.

The irate bourgeois mother and the more conservative older brother feel like familiar figures from Italian cinema of decades past. Lord of the Ants sometimes gets mired in its old fashioned, clunky beats. Even though we see young demonstrators on the street supporting Braibanti, the conventionality of Lord of the Ants seems little to acknowledge them, to take too seriously the archaic, repressive viewpoints expressed in the trial.

On the other hand, Braibanti is a complex and remarkable figure here, a playwright, poet but perhaps in his heart of hearts a scientist, specifically a myrmecologist, or ant expert, whose Tower was a community of young people gathered around him and drawn in by his energy and almost renaissance multiple accomplishments. He inspires them. But he also does seem to manipulate them and want to gather a cult around himself. He yells at his young charges. He isn't a pleasant or likable man at all. But Ettore isn't a minor and he both loves and is inspired by Braibanti. We see a love here, a sexual one, between a young and a middle-aged man: and this is a bold element for any Italian film however conventional the rest of it is.

The events that play out lead to the destruction of both men. Ettore's mother imprisons him in a program to "cure" him of his homosexuality that includes a horrible series of electroshock treatments. Ettore becomes a ghost of his former self. And yet he never loses his love and admiration for Braibanti and still says is the most important person in his life and now knows that his family are now his enemies. Aldo and Ettore have one final rather distant but friendly meeting.

As played by Elio Germano, Ennio Scribani, the correspondent for the Rome communist paper Unità assigned to the "plagio" court case that leads Braibanti to be sentenced to nine years imprisonment (though it is reduced) has a double function in the film. He is an easygoing, good humored, perpetually hat-wearing and tieless fellow un-hampered by Catholicism or conservative morality. Thus he provides a balance to the overwrought views of everybody else. (This somewhat simplistic depiction contrasts with Germano's complex and vulnerable portrayal of Giacomo Leopardi in the 2014 Mario Martone biopic also shown in this year's Open Roads Italian film series.) Scribani's presence also enables Amelio to get in a dig at the communist newspaper, whose editor the film represents as a creep without liberal ideas who, somewhat late in the game, expresses regret at having assigned Scribani to the trial and encourages him to resign from the paper, which he does. But while in the film Scribani isn't allowed to use the word "homosexual" or even "communist" in his articles, which are sometimes trashed or replaced by the obnoxious editor, the Quinlin article points out this isn't true.

Despite its flaws Lord of the Ants is still an impressive depiction of this important case. The screenplay keeps the complexity of the issues, especially the fact that Braibanti, though wrongly accused, is a hard man to like and also the fact that young Ettore is rather confused. The film is shines in the performances of Lo Cascio as the forceful but unappealing Braibanti and Germano as the smiling, independent-minded journalist Scribani. The revelation is Leonardo Maltese who as Ettore Tagliaferri, the young gay man destroyed by his own family, is like an open wound, an immensely appealing actor we are likely to see again.

Lord of the Ants/Il signore delle formiche, 134 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 6, 2022 and opened in Italy Sept. 8. It also showed at Busan, Rio, Chicago, and five other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the June 1-8, 2023 Film at Lincoln Center-Cinecittà series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
Monday, June 5 at 6:00pm
Wednesday, June 7 at 3:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

MARIO MARTONE: LEOPARDI/LEOPARDI: IL GIOVANE FAVOLOSO (2014)


ELIO GERMANO IN LEOPARDI

Giacomo Leopardi's life of suffering and creation

This gorgeous, full-dress historical film recreates the troubled and remarkable life of the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century as well as one of Italy's greatest philologists, essayists, and philosophers, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), eldest son of a count in Recanati, in le Marche. Leopardi was presented in the 2023 Italian series at Lincoln Center as part of a tribute to the director Mario Martone. Central to the film's success is the sympathetic performance of Elio Germano as Leopardi. It's an engaging story; but as happens with biopics of great men, there's a struggle to maintain balance between the achievements and the personal drama, and the personal drama decisively wins out.

This is because Leopardi suffered from extraordinary physical problems that progressively bent him over and made his short life wracked with pain. It is a remarkable and demanding physical performance by Germano, who is seen as Leopardi struggling more and more to walk and becoming bent over. The great poet and thinker is never forgotten by the film, but the viewer, especially the one not trained in Italian literature, comes away with a memory dominated by the broken body more than the wonderful verses and brilliant mind.

The childhood (when Giacomo is played by Filippo Chierici) is happy. We see him running and playing with his brother Carlo Orazio and sister Paolina. His brilliance is clear and he's put to work studying with priests but learns mostly, irregularly, plunging into the magnificent library assembled by his father, the grand and conservative Count Monaldo Leopoardi (Massimo Popolizio). We see displays of his knowledge, sight-reading Homer in Greek, and from Hebrew. We also may realize this isn't a balanced education but one steeped in language and philology. But he also reads philosophy, and refers to Nietzsche. And then we hear some of his poetry, which of course sounds poetic if experienced through movie subtitles, but for a true appreciation of which one must understand Italian.

The Italian subtitle "Il giovane favoloso," despite the richness of the mise-en-scène, is more wish than reality, because it is impossible to experience the full fabulousness of a life of such remarkable achievement. And while Giacomo angrily tells judges who deny him a prize who complain of his pessimism that it has nothing to do with his constant, increasing physical ill health, and we hear from him that he has dozens of projects, too many to complete, we see more of his love of Fanny (Anna Mouglalis), who is inevitably more interested in his best friend Ranieri (Michele Riondino), and this turns into a bromance when Ranieri leaves with Leopardi and takes care of him, which takes over the film's last half and is its most memorable and moving focus.

It is a physical feat for Germano, then in his mid-thirties, to look both older and later prematurely aging, and to go through all the contortions of Leopardi's disease of the neck and spine. It is speculated that he had either Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, both deformations of the spine.

The childhood (when Giacomo is played by Filippo Chierici) is happy. We see him running and playing with Carlo Orazio and sister Paolina. His brilliance is clear and he's put to work studying with priests but learns mostly, irregularly, plunging into the magnificent library assembled by his father, the grand and conservative Count Monaldo Leopoardi(Massimo Popolizio) We see displays of his knowledge, sight-reading Homer in Greek, and from Hebrew. We also may realize this isn't a balanced education but one steeped in language and philology; but he also read philosophy, and refers to Nietzsche. And then we hear some of his poetry, which of course sounds poetic if experienced through movie subtitles, but for a true appreciation of which one must understand Italian.

An important early event is the visit from older admirer the classicist Pietro Giordani (Valerio Valasco) - a first recognition of his growing fame and reputation and a challenge to the power of his domineering father. But other memorable scenes indicate that during his lifetime Leopardi was misunderstood or undervalued and it was likely in years following his short life that his extraordinary achievement and importance as a poet became recognized.

The Italian subtitle "Il giovane favoloso," despite the richness of the mise-en-scène, is more wish than reality, because it is impossible to experience the full fabulousness of a life of such remarkable achievement. And while Giacomo angrily tells judges who deny him a prize who complain of his pessimism that it has nothing to do with his constant, increasing physical ill health, we hear from him that he has dozens of projects, too many to complete, we see more of his love of Fanny (Anna Mouglalis), who is inevitably more interested in his best friend Ranieri (Michele Riondino), and this turns into a bromance when Ranieri leaves with Leopardi and takes care of him.

Of course the problem with a writer biopic is that the audience can't spend much time watching the man at a desk with pen writing though that be the most important time in the man's short life. What we would prefer to see is Leopardi in front of a big window looking at the full moon and spouting verses he makes up about it. (This is one of the most beautiful images of a movie full of them.)

Leopardi was robbed of the great love a romanic poet was due, but his life is nonetheless a quintessential nineteenth-century artist's story, running from aristocratic origins to an impoverished early sickly death (he may even have had tuberculosis). And in place of love he had the passionate friendship of his great friend Ranieri. Early on he dreamed of escape - which his father did not want him to do - but eventually broke away with Ranieri and became "the toast of Florence." Later he and Ranieri move to Naples. There is a sequence suggesting (as Wikipedia does) that Leopardi's closeness to Fanny's younger brother reflected he may have been gay. The "more than twenty-five sentimental female friendships" Leopardi had in his lifetime (also indicated in Wikipedia), Martone doesn't describe in this vivid and impressionistic portrait.

More memorable sequences than any of the ones sitting at desks dipping quill pens into glass inkwells are those of a cholera epidemic in Naples when Leopardi dodges two men carrying a dead body along a cobblestone street, tall, thin, black-garbed figures coming to collect the dead from houses, and later, when Ranieri has arranged for the still-virgin Leopardi to visit a brothel and this becomes a hellish escape through fire-lit subterranean passages when he is mocked as "toady" and forced to run away. Martone pulls out all the stops in all these scenes: they are marvelously realized, though they are objective correlatives, one knows, for other things that can only be experienced in reading a book, for this is a man whose greatness is best experienced on the page, not the screen. But it is still good to have this film, even if it is a little overblown, to bring to life a great poet many have read, or to inspire others to read him for the first time.

Leopardi/Leopardi: il giovane favoloso,143 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2014. It was screened for this review at the June 1-8, 2023 Cinecittà-Film at Lincoln Center series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

[Chris Knipp]

MARIO MARTONE: TROUBLING LOVE/L'AMORE MOLESTO (1995)


ANNA BONAIUTO IN L'AMORE MOLESTO

TRAILER

In gorgeous search of lost somethings

This is a film of great beauty from the most admired writer of contemporary Italy, Elena Ferrante, her first novel, which series-featured auteur Mario Martone presents in a fresh mix of brilliant Eastman Technicolor and period sepia that, though 28 years old, looks newly minted. And that red dress! On the body of Delia (popular and simpatica Anna Bonaiuto), the protagonist/daughter/detective/analyst of the story, it fits so perfectly, once she dons it, she remains long unwilling to take it off. One can almost love this movie without understanding it. But as one who has never been able to tune in to the feminine, meridionale southern Italian saga-melodrama world of this internationally celebrated writer, despite savoring the feel of multicolored noirish magic given off by L'amore molesto, and appreciating the leanness of its 104 minutes, I found it baffling and inexplicable. (As a longtime student of Italian, I have also never learned to love the swallowed truncations of Neapolitan or Sicilian dialects - another possible obstacle - just as I've never quite warmed to the twang of Québecois French.)

Delia lives alone now in Bologna and makes a living as a comic strip artist. Getting a rather strange call from her mother Amalia (Angela Luce) in high spirits, she returns to her native Naples for Amalia's birthday, to find her parent has washed up on the shore dead. (Naples will be a key character: the long-lens-emphasized crowd scenes of the city and its varied public transportation almost burst off the screen.) The coroner declares nothing amiss (what about the homicide detectives?), but Delia unsurprisingly finds the circumstances peculiar, and lingers to explore recent relationships but also delve into not so much her mother's death as her life, and above all moments of her own, Delia's, childhood, and flowing through it all "another man," tall, with wavy gray hair, in a handsome linen suit, "very elegant," someone says - the man, or perhaps the suit? - who appears and reappears, as does his boisterous son Antonio (Peppe Lanzetta).

This "elegant" man, Nicola Polliedro (Giovanni Viglietti) but known as Caserta, is still around, and teases Delia like a sleazy but well-dressed phantom. A miscreant, thief, and freeloader even into the present day, Caserta represents Italian male charm at its most durable and dubious. He is old and wrinkly, but he is tall and well dressed, has good hair, thinks well of himself - and is nimble on his feet. Delia chases him up and down an old building in vain: why? This is a sequence that might work better on the page than on the screen: when we see it, it becomes harder to see this as actually happening.

In the case of Delia's actual encounter with Caserta's rude and inelegant but equally full-of-himself son Antonio (Peppe Lanzetta), who runs a clothing store now, what's so hard is not to believe it's happening but to understand how Delia puts up with his behavior, following him to a sauna (well yes, he was a childhood friend) where he molests her and yet she goes right on sitting with him and talking to him. This encounter is troubling, while a visit to the artist father (Italo Celoro) is too brief and disappointing, a footnote.

What troubles me more globally is the way the film - presumably Ferrante in the novel - weaves elements in and out, present and past, without in doing so quite answering the viewer's basic questions, assuming that, as for the Ferrante devotee may be true, we all simply hang on Delia's musings and don't care. It is plain that what happened between Caserta and Amalia recently and how Amalia died don't matter to her but are merely hors d'oeuvres leading us to the main dish of what happened to Delia and what she did at the age of seven.

A recent anglophone DVD rating person, myreviewercom, who gives the film rather short shrift (she should have seen it on the magnificent screen with the exquisite sound of FLC's Walter Reade Theater as I did), points out Delia's three symbolic costumes: the severe pants suit she travels from Bologna wearing; the aforementioned red dress, "supposedly chosen for her birthday by her mother", to plunge into the sensuous world of Naples and her and her mother's memories; and her mother's old two piece dress suit she finally puts on, signaling the moment when Delia either "decides she's had enough" and "will never find out what has happened" or concludes that "the hinted at secrets" are "too painful" to unearth. She also decides in penance for childhood wrongdoing symbolically to become her mother.) The reviewer, like me, was left uncertain over what it all means. This seems partly a case where reverent film adapters have tried to cram too much of their source novel into a movie runtime and wound up resultingly making a confusing film.

The difference is that I'm not puzzled about why this film was in Competition at Cannes and won multiple top Italian awards for the year: L'amore molesto shows the gifted, fluent Mario Martone at the top of his cinematic powers. It is a magnificent film to look at. In a way it is better than the other two of his films, also fine, shown at this year's Open Roads FLC series. The new film Nostalgia, also from a novel, also about a return to Naples, makes more sense and is more satisfying, but it is relatively drab, all focus on the storytelling, satisfying, certainly, but without the orgasmic sound and image of L'amore molesto. Martone's 2024 Leopardi: il giovane favoloso is gorgeous and fluent and rich in mise-en-scène too. But it has the limitations of the conventional biopic, the rush to tell a story, and lacks the mystery and poetry of the other two.

Delving into past experiences and family secrets has never been more beautiful or well suggested or integrated with a rich urban environment as in L'amore molesto. But the crime-detection intro is misleading and, as the DVD reviewer suggests, it's all, in this adapted version of Ferrante's novel at least, a bit of a tease. The mystery isn't solved. Nor is the madeleine traced to the primal memory. This turns out to be a beautiful ride to somewhere not fully specified.

Troubling Love/L'amore molesto, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 1995 after an April release in Italy. It showed at some other festivals and released internationally. At home it captured three David Di Donatello Awards in 1995 — Best Actress for Bonaiuto, Best Director for Martone, and Best Supporting Actress for Angela Luce as Delia’s mother. [The title has also been translated as "Nasty Love." Let's admit we just can't capture "amore molesto" in English.] Screened for this review at the Walter Reade Theater Jun. 6, 2023 at 9:00 pm as part of the Cinecittà-Film at Lincoln Center Jun. 1-18, 2023 series Open Roads: New American Cinema.