Mauro Bolognini | Agostino / 1962

saro’s caresses and von aschenbach’s stares

by Douglas Messerli  

 

Goffredo Parise and Mauro Bolognini (screenplay, based on a fiction by Alberto Moravia), Mauro Bolognini (director) Agostino / 1962

 

Over the years I have increasingly grown fond of the films of Mauro Bolognini, terribly adventurous about both LGBTQ and heterosexual issues for his day, but almost too elliptical and outwardly uneventful for today’s audiences. But then there are his always artful black-and-white images, in this film glorious pans of the Venice canals, his camera’s shy glimpses of its darkened almost empty and dead buildings rising out of the water ready to drain off the Venetian’s bodies who hide within. And finally, there is always Bolognini’s cinema caresses of the human form, particularly the male physique which in this film is particularly focused on that of young boys in a manner that contemporary audiences might find most disturbing.

     And in this film, Agostino, we also cannot dismiss his cinematic exploration of the female, particularly of the dreamlike sensuality of a young wealthy widow (Ingrid Thulin), who finally blossoms into a sexual being under the attentions of a local stud (John Saxon).    

      However, the street boys—in this case you’d have to call them beach boys—who fellow filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom Bolognini often worked, lusted after—are gathered here in a gang dressed in their torn shirts and shorts or even naked, constantly jumping upon one another, wrestling, and racing into their natural element, water. At one crucial juncture they even initiate a homosexual sex act to mock the heterosexual version, one of the boys, Roma, leaping upon another Tripoli (Gennaro Mesfun) to fuck him as the others shout out, presumably in rhythm in Roma’s pounding of the other boy’s buttocks, “open sesame.”

       Tripoli, in fact, is a young gay boy in the thrall of the only adult in their group, Saro’s (Mario Bartoletti) pedophilic attentions. Despite his unwanted attentions to them in the past, which in their recognition leads them all, except Tripoli, to refuse him their company on his fishing forays, they hover about him nonetheless, as if unable to completely refuse the power this still handsome, perhaps mentally challenged man still has over them. 

       Into this world of contradictory sexualities that are at once beckoning, terrifying, and perverted the director and his authors set down the completely innocent Agostino, the 13-year-old son of the wealthy widow who, while traveling with him to Venice on their vacation, treats him more as a lover than her adolescent son, sleeping with him in the same bed, kissing him gently on the lips and asking he return such kisses, even permitting him to play the little father by ordering up hotel breakfast and restaurant waiter service as well as arranging for the daily trips out into the ocean by small boat. In short, she symbolically if not quite literally plays the same role to her son as Saro does to Tripoli and the other boys, except, obviously, her near pedophilic actions also hint of incest.

      Within the bubble of their intimacy the two hide in plain sight, lovers who could never even imagine fulfilling their unthought desires. But when Renzo suddenly meets up with the mother on the beach, she shyly responding like the young school girl she probably was when she met Agostino’s father, everything changes, for both her and, more importantly, for her son. 

       He has now become a beloved but obtrusive trinket that she is forced to carry with her everywhere, like a tiara that has gotten caught up in her hair. For him, her attentions to another shock him into the realization that their love was not the true focus of her life, and he feels now not left alone but somehow sullied by having so deeply loved the person who his uncomprehending mind begins to understand is a sexual being interested in hooking up with an adult man.

     The silent war between them goes on for some time, with Renzo attempting to pull his mother further from her son without being obvious or, for the matter, insensitive to the situation. It reminds me a bit on a woman and her attentive son living in another vacation hotel as portrayed in Robert Siodmak’s 1933 film Brennendes Geheimmis (The Burning Secret), only in that case the young child’s ego allowed him to believe the gentleman caller was more interested in him than in his mother. Here Agostino, having no illusions about the situation, almost drops out of sight, and finally, after daring to describe her actions as “playing hard to get,” is properly put in his place with a slap to his cheek, demanding he almost literally drop out of their “picture.”

     What he finds in their place is the world of the beach boys which I have described above, buying his way into their midst with a package of cigarettes and a bill of few thousand lira scrummaged from his mother’s purse. Roma immediately attempts to teach him how to smoke and a few minutes later, after the boys mock him for his mother’s wealth and their belief that such women spend their evenings in sexual whoring, take him into their little tribe, teaching him the machinations of sex by pantomiming the act of sexual intercourse with Tripoli I described above.

       Understandably, the boy is perplexed by what they tell him about his world, shocked somewhat by their easy heterosexual brawling with one another, and, perhaps most puzzling of all for his own inner sense of reality, attracted to them and their sexuality. Theirs is a fascinating world with which he would like to become a part, but knows that he will never truly be openly invited and allowed to partake of.

       Soon, however, the gentle Sora has cast his eye upon him and an older boy Sandro has somewhat taken Agostino under his wing, explaining to him about the local Felliniesque whore Tecla who together they catch a glimpse of asleep in her ramshackle hut.

        Upon another attempt to meet up with the boys, however, he finds them all missing, they having boated over by themselves to a nearby island where presumably they’ll play, fish, and eat the watermelon they have somehow uncovered. Agostino finds only Saro and his boy lover left on the beach. The gentle he-man offers to take Agostino on his own boat to find them, and Agostino—completely unknowing about what the other boys have long ago come to perceive about him—readily agrees, Tripoli himself suddenly becoming animated with the prospect.

        Yet as Saro asks his boy lover to help push them off, he pushes him as well back into the water, insisting that he’s not wanted on this voyage. We suspect him, but almost as innocent as Agostino do not quite comprehend why he asks the young boat-mate to recite poetry until we see his hand move gently to caress Agostino’s face. The boy backs off, continuing, however, to recite Goethe’s words of a boy speaking to his father. Stimulated by the child’s discourse, Saro moves closer yet again, but when he realizes he still frightens the boy, he backs off, repeating to himself that, after all, he is a good man, insisting almost under breath rather than as an explanation to Agostino that he does not force his sexual attentions on boys, but merely encourages them.

    By the time they’ve reached the island, however, Tripoli, having found another mode of transportation, has already arrived, telling the other boys what seems now be fact to them, that Agostino is also a queer, having likely accepted the pleasures of Saro’s touches and sexual acts.

 

      Once more, Agostino is utterly confused. Why are they calling him a queer, and what does it even mean? Sandro takes him aside to explain, which further infuriates Agostino over Tripoli’s behavior, betrayed obviously by the aggrieved lover.

       This incident and Renzo’s further attentions toward his mother is what finally sends the 13-year-old into a series of confused dreams where he is alternately attracted to the males such as Saro and Sandro and equally fascinated by the images his mind conjures up of women, particularly his own mother. Tormented by the chaos of new feelings, he steals more money from his mother’s purse and sets out to find Sandro to help him pay for sex with the prostitute so that he might experience heterosexuality and blot out the image of his mother with lover.

      But even Sandro ultimately betrays him, using the money so that he might visit Tecla alone, the prostitute laughing at even the idea that she would permit a young boy to enter her domain. Barred from even what he sees as the cure, the boy has no choice but to return home to request that they leave Venice, having outstayed the usual visiting period, just as did Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. If nothing else, he insists, his mother must stop treating him as a boy.

       Of course, neither of his wishes can yet be fulfilled. They will stay on surely until it is time to return home for his schooling, and given his mother’s attraction to Renzo, perhaps even longer, joining that community of ghosts who live in the tourist-based city for the entire year. And even though she promises to treat him like a man, Agostino knows that he is not yet a man, but a being unable to feel at home in either the boys’ or now his mother’s worlds.

       Whether or not he becomes homosexual or heterosexual, only time will tell; but at 13 everything for such a suddenly knowing boy is an option. And that is the way Bolognini closes his film, with uncommitted choices, with questions about the future for both the boy and his mother.

       That, in fact, is one of the wonders of Bolognini’s works, which usually end in sexual chaos, with the recognition that permanent choices are almost always ridiculous to make. While touring the canals of the city with a traditional gondolier, Renzo points out to the boy and his mother a grand house that was once the home of a man some called mad, who threw large wild parties, often requiring his guests to appear naked in the back yard to perform as what sound to be “living statues,” tableau vivants of famous sculptures and works of art. Eventually the house was closed down because the neighbors complained of the nightly visual orgies.

      The mother responds with an expression of sad distaste, but Renzo assures her that no, the participants thoroughly enjoyed the evenings and found great pleasure in their games.

        Had this work ended there, we might have also thoroughly enjoyed this work’s splendors. But at the end and throughout writers and directors felt they needed to introduce a narrator to quote lines from the original author, Moravia, which despite their somewhat poetic tone, reveal the hack psychological analysis of Agostino’s behavior that the original was. We don’t need to be told, even poetically, that her son is developing into a “mamma’s boy” or that their relationship was a kind pseudo-incest. His confusion and anger doesn’t stop there but extends to what he has learned also about class distinction and about his own unstated desires which go far beyond the mother. What if Tadzio in Death in Venice had actually come to enjoy or even long for von Aschenbach’s stares? Freud did not have a sufficient explanation nor apparently does Moravia. Bolognini brings up the subject only as an important question, the kinds of issues he has raised in many of his early works.

      That he did this so effectively in 1962 tells us just how far he was ahead of his times.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).