Giuseppe Bucci | Una note ancora (One More Night) / 2012

staying true to the script

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Bucci (screenwriter and director) Una note ancora (One More Night) / 2012 [11 minutes]

 

If theater and role playing is somehow at the heart of Adam Salky’s work, so too are they central to Italian director Giuseppe Bucci’s One More Night.

     It begins melodramatically and remains that almost throughout. A middle-aged man, Paulo (Ivan Bacchi) wakes up alone in bed, his unnamed younger companion, performed by Marco Cacciapuoti, having already risen, removing his ring, and leaving. 

     The movie continues with an immediate flashback to the previous evening, Paulo on his way home from work, having brought a white rose to his younger lover as token of deep love, joyfully traveling through the streets. But when he enters his apartment he is faced with his lover sitting a table writing, his bags packed. He is obviously writing a letter of farewell, and Paulo immediately understands the situation, tossing the rose to the floor and entering the balcony where he remains until the sky turns black. When he returns to the lit up room he declares—almost as the Marschallin might to her lover Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier—“I know, you’re still too young for me…and cannot wait to fly freely.” Still, he wonders if there isn’t anything he can do to keep the boy, reminding him that he said he loved him. When the younger man insists he does still love him, Paulo says, no, “I love you.”

     He looks at the boy’s “sad puppy face,” insisting that it is obvious that the boy can’t wait to leave and “fuck around,” if he hasn’t already.

      Marco returns to the other room, and in a dramatic fashion Paulo follows him, declaring that he had hoped to spend the rest of his life with him, horrified that he’s now he’s leaving!

      The younger man turns to leave, with Paulo holding him back, begging him not to go, as Marco pulls away sending the older man to the floor. Finally in tears, Paulo accepts the younger man’s hand to help him up, pleading for him to spend just one more night.

      It is morning once more, and Paulo awakens to find the boy gone.

      But when he actually rises, the boy is now on the balcony drinking coffee. Paulo joins him and slips several bills to him, the other saying goodbye, and reminding him to call when he needs him again. Incidentally, he interrupts himself, he knows how to play a great many other such games; mightn’t they try a story with another plot? His elder replies no, as the other exits.

      Clearly it has been an act, a drama performed by a prostitute Paulo has hired for the night, having employed him evidently many times previously to perform the same script, based apparently on the real event some time ago.

       Paulo is obviously a man who cannot free himself from his own past, forced to play out again and again the sad leave-taking of his younger lover, he actually aging in the process as the younger lover, in the form of ageless younger actors, never changing. It is a sad playing out of the story of Der Rosenkavalier week after week, year after year, as the elder remains trapped forever, a bit also like Miss Havisham of Great Expectations in a bittersweet past.

     Bucci’s short film played in over 26 LGBTQ festivals, winning several best short movie, director, and acting awards in 2012 and 2013.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).