Marius Gabriel Stancu | L'anniversario (The Anniversary) / 2022

torment in silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marius Gabriel Stancu (screenwriter and director) L'anniversario (The Anniversary) / 2022 / [17 minutes]

 

It is the fifth anniversary of Rosa (Stella Mastrantonio) and Roberto’s (Joseph Altamura) engagement, and Rosa, with her younger brother Angelo (Tobia De Angelis) waits for her husband to show up after work to celebrate, although it’s clear from the very beginning that she is tense and in no mood to truly enjoy the evening.

     Angelo begins the film—after a brief scene which I’ll return to later—by asking his sister, if she intends to celebrate. “What do you want to celebrate? We have been together for five years now.” It’s obviously that the joy of the relationship has worn away with those years. And when the camera finally reveals her in the pool with Angelo on a sun chair nearby, it is quite clear that she is tense and worried, something which her brother is also attempting to ignore as he shifts over to sun his back, a position in which he no longer needs to face her.

          A few moments later, she expresses what has truly been on her mind: “By the way, have you heard about that boy found dead in the countryside?” And from that moment on, we know we have entered a truly tense territory with murder, perhaps, just around the corner.

         Yes, Angelo has heard, and as Rosa reminds him, they were classmates, although he insists he was in another class. Who knows what happened? But as Rosa adds, there are many rumors spreading in town. They say he was in bad company; no, she corrects herself, that he was dating a married man older than him. She’s not convinced that he committed suicide, and wonders if her brother has heard something else.

      Why, she would wonder that, of course, speaks loudly to the fact that she is quite certain that Roberto and Angelo may be in some way involved.

         From that first scene of the film, an older is seen man simply kissing a younger man who is laying on a bed, the boy asking him if he’ll be meeting him at the usual place in the countryside, we already suspect that something is up between her missing husband and the boy.

         Angelo’s answer is curt: “We didn’t use to hang out together.”

         But does that mean that he doesn’t know him, that they might not “hang out together” today?

      The Romanian-born Italian director Marius Gabriel Stancu has noted that he was influenced by what he describes as a “sort of literary kammerspiele” by Raymond Carver, “With Lots of Water a Stone’s Throw from Home,” in which a woman has suspicions about her husband concerning the body of a woman found on the shore of a nearby lake.

 

“I tried to do the same in L'anniversario, in which another woman asks questions whose answers provoke hardly restrained reactions, in a single place, the swimming pool, as in a staging at the theatre. Here a family and affective context is now on the point of being revealed as it really is, and with the reactions it provokes in all the members who belong to it; tormented yet still hopeful for a different ending, even in the face of the evident adversity of the facts.”

 

      It’s already clear in The Anniversary that Rosa believes her brother knows far more than he claims he does, and he is angry for that presumption.

     The director makes it immediately apparent that Angelo’s anger is also a bluff, as we watch him in the very next frame sitting in the car with the same boy of the earlier scene, kissing him and going down on him to suck his cock.

      Meanwhile, the man we soon discover is Roberto arrives and knocks on the car window.

      Angelo claims he has brought the boy to him as a gift, the boy introducing himself as Emil. So perhaps this is the first time that Roberto has actually meant his young lover, Angelo’s memory of that event.    

 

     But we are even more confused because in the middle of Roberto’s knock at the car window, and the introduction, Roberto has shown up, early, at the pool, presumably ready to fully celebrate the evening with his wife and her brother.

     Or was it the first time that Roberto has met Emil? Was Angelo knowingly or unknowingly playing around with his brother-in-law’s lover? Did the boy simply introduce himself to keep their cover.

     Later we see Emil calling for Roberto to come pick him up, evidently having been left behind by both Roberto and Emil. He’s nervous as dusk is approaching. As time passes, he even threatens to tell people about their relationship.

       Does Roberto eventually return to kill him? Did he truly die of suicide, left alone in the countryside with no way to return but an impossibly long hike? Or did Angelo, perhaps, return to commit the act at Roberto’s bidding? There is even a suggestion that Angelo is in a relationship with Roberto, and that he brought the boy to Roberto so that he could be with him again, leaving because he couldn’t handle it.

      As several commentators have observed, Stancu’s plot is far too confusing.

   Not that the narrative of events truly matter. Whatever happened, it is clear that Roberto was responsible, and Rose senses it, perhaps having known of his hidden sexuality all along. The torment all three feel is very much like what the director claims he sought in attempting to recreate what is insufferable to all involved as they face “the evident adversity of the facts.”

     As Emil argues on his cellphone, “Sooner or later everyone will know.”

    The film ends with Síliva Tomas singing in “Tiempo de preguntar,” “what is hidden…breaks you,” and no matter how bad or ugly, it’s far better to break it open, to let it out, Roberto and Rosa clumsily performing what may be their last anniversary dance, Angelo, with tears running from Angelo’s eyes.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).