Giuseppe Patroni Griffi | Metti, una sera a cena (Love Circle) / 1969

china is china: conversations at dinner

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dario Argento and Carlo Carunchio (screenplay, based on the play by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi), Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (director) Metti, una sera a cena (Love Circle) / 1969

 

After seeing and reviewing theater director and filmmaker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Il Mare (1962) I was anxious to view his 1969 film Metti, una sera a cena (which literally means, “Let’s say, an evening for dinner”), mundanely retitled Love Circle in English; but I was so involved in finishing the 1887-1929 volume of My Queer Cinema that I simply couldn’t immediately get to it. Finally, yesterday I was able to view the film and was delighted by what I saw.

     There has been very little English-language commentary on the work—more about Ennio Morricone’s wonderful musical score than the film itself—and what has been written complains, as US viewers who haven’t yet learned how to read more complex European films often do, that the work seems didactic and narratively confusing.

 

  Since the play, originally written by Patroni Griffi and turned into a screenplay by Dario Argento and Carlo Carunchio, is not simply a torrid, outré romance as most viewers probably saw it, but is loosely based on Plato’s Symposium, and Argento rightfully determined to break up any linear sense of narrative in order to provide a more lively interchange and rhythm regarding the various viewpoints of eros that the film outlines, it should surprise no one that the film’s characters present their stated ideas and feelings about love in a rather random, out of sequence, manner. This is no domestic sex comedy.

     Indeed, as a traditional love story this tale would be basically pointless and certainly uninteresting, one of thousands of films that gets all excited about a wife having an affair with another man and the husband simultaneously having an affair with another woman. Americans were constantly being shocked and amazed, particularly in the 1960s, by the French and Italian’s incidental demonstration of such “naughty” affairs. In this case, however, it is their mutual friend who truly changes the traditional pattern of such farces, but even his more untraditional behavior is not truly what matters.

      The husband, Michele (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a film writer who is obviously extremely popular beginning the film with a celebratory gathering of admirers and the press, some of whom argue that his writing is simply shallow in its popularity. Indeed the whole encounter might remind one of Federico Fellini’s director in 8 ½, except that nothing really is made of it as his close friend Max (Tony Musante) suddenly appears and helps him escape from the happenings.

       The two are obviously best friends who feel comfortable with one another to talk about nearly anything. And the subject that Michele seizes upon is his next film script for which he’s consideringly a story about marital affairs going on under the very nose of the central character, he proposing, as example, that Max is having an affair with Nina, Michele’s wife—in fact, we soon discover that is precisely the case, either Michaele being absolutely blind or simply purposely playing dumb to see if he can wheedle a confession out of Max.        

     But before we can even begin to establish those realities, we observe his wife Nina (Florinda Bolkan) visit the underground lair of a beautiful young “rebel”—although obviously a bourgeois dropout, since he clearly relies of the cash payments of his sexual partners—Ric (Lino Capolicchio). Nina has sex with the beauty, wrapped since he appears to have no available blankets and she is cold, in a Nazi flag which he has among his few recent found treasures.

       Nina simply returns home, and that evening she and Michele dine as they do most nights with their close friends, Max and the wealthy unmarried Giovanna (Annie Girardot). Their conversation, evidently representative of most evenings together, is a rather droll and sometimes witty discussion of sex, including their own real and possible relationships. Gradually between

what is said and what is happening under the table—events that are occasionally repeated throughout the film so that we might perceive them in different contexts—we begin to comprehend that Max has long been a sexual partner to Nina, even before she married Michele, and that Giovanna and Michele occasionally make love when the other two are off to the theater (Max is an actor) or when other appropriate “excuses” are made such as illness or personal problems. Michaele doesn’t seem to mind much nor, clearly, Giovanna although she feels it shameful that her friend is so obvious about her “other affections,” to which she has admitted all to Giovanna. Indeed, what we are really observing is what we might today describe as a polyamorous series of relationships that are apparently important in order for their love and friendship for each other to survive.

 

     What’s more, we soon discover, is that Max is bisexual, and has previously had a long affair with Ric, introducing him to Nina so that they might together share him and bring a bit more excitement into their sexual play. Of course, the fact that Nina is now highly attracted to Ric and he to her, brings up the former relationship the boy had with Max, competitive barbs being thrown out from time to time, much like the talk at dinner with Michele, Max, Nina, and Giovanni, each pointing up their particular weaknesses and viewpoints on what they define as love.

     To make it even a bit more sexually complex we eventually learn that when Nina determined to marry Michele years before, since she was already in a relationship with Max, it was not simply her marring him but they marrying Michaele, making it clear that perhaps the most passionate relationship of all in this “circle” is the love that is totally unspoken and sexually unexpressed between Max and Michaele.

      We might say that this quartet of lovers are perfectly happy in their various open secrets, willing to allow each of the others to move in and out of the more traditional relationships they have as husband and wife, friends, and confidants—perfectly happy that is until Max introduces Ric into his and Nina’s sexual acts

   For unlike the sophisticated world which they inhabit, a world which Ric has abandoned, he represents himself as a barbarian at heart—or at least a would-be barbarian. And when he finally finds himself totally in love with Nina he wants her as a lover all to himself, without any of the polite polyamorous permissions of the noblisse oblige. His demands suddenly shake this seemingly unshakeable community at its roots.

   Threatening suicide if he cannot be loved only by Nina, the boy suddenly makes everyone, particularly Max and Nina aware that love has limits which can be challenged. In one scene later in the film, indeed, Ric demands to comprehend the hierarchy of Nina’s affections by asking one by one who she would throw off a high tower, him or Michele, Michele or Max, herself or Michele, etc.

      Although Max, who still sees the Ric he first hired for sexual pleasure as a boy whose declaration of suicide he imagines as merely a meaningless threat to get attention, Nina who has never before had one man truly demanding her alone without others involved, perceives the danger. She runs to Ric’s side at the very moment he attempts to hang himself, pulling him down from his noose in order to save him.

 

   Played out at the very moment that Max is performing in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author which—with its own issues of sexuality, of the interchangeability of characters and actors, of reality and theatricality, along with the fact that the young boy of the play kills himself with a gun in the last act—reflects also on what is happening in the film to its characters, bringing up further questions of what each character truly feels, imagines they feel, or is supposed to feel for one another, particularly when Nina decides to leave Michaele and live with Ric, depriving the trio of  the center of their emotional endurance.

     Basically laconic through the work, Michaele now seems to come alive as a kind commentator on Eros suggesting that demanding faithfulness has nothing to do with love, that love is perseverance rather than a temporary emotion, reminding those familiar with Plato somewhat of Agathon to Max’s Aristophanes.

      Ultimately, Ric’s fears and jealousies prove too much not only for Nina but for Ric himself, who brings her back to Michele explaining he is simply unable to deal with such a powerful force of love.

      Michaele gracefully accepts his wife back only if Ric himself brings her to their table, joining their round table as a regular guest.    

    He does so, perhaps like the late-arriving Socrates speaking for an ideal love the others do not truly comprehend or desire. Yet, it appears to me, that Michele has the best line; responding to a comment that they have now restored the table, he insists that no, it is not a table, but is a “raft.” And indeed, they do seek the brief time they have with one another almost out of a sense of survival, Max suggesting that soon one day, without warning, China may suddenly send out three nuclear bombs at the very same moment, one to Europe, one to the US, and the other to Russia, ending the civilized world.

 

    Patroni Graffi’s world, accordingly, is ultimately not so very different from Andrei Tarkovsky’s world as expressed in The Sacrifice of two decades later, when each of them have to weigh their little raft of love and family against the destruction of their world. And we have to wonder, at what price have they asked the man to dinner who constantly demands moral choices, their own Socrates. One suspects that they may eventually turn on him, demanding he sacrifice his own life to their more dubious pleasures.

      No one fully gets what they desire in this work, and in fact neither they nor we truly discover what it is in love that they each truly want. Each of these figures play many roles in Plato’s configuration of banquet guests of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, and Alcibiades, and we would never be able to perceive them as fully representing any of these ancients’ viewpoints. But the very fact that they continuously struggle together to define their feelings about one another makes them more serious lovers than those we might find in any of the normative heterosexual monogamous relationships which make up the majority of contemporary cinematic liaisons of love. And perhaps they are far richer for it.

     Finally, it would be fascinating to compare this 1969 movie with Nik Sheehan’s 1996 documentary-like Symposium: The Ladder of Love.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).