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.
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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).
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