now you are my age
by Douglas Messerli
Barbara Alberti, Amadeo Paganini, and
Salvatore Samperi (screenplay, based on the fiction by Umberto Saba), Salvatore
Samperi (director) Ernesto / 1979, USA 1983
Working as a managing assistant and accountant for his wealthy Jewish
uncle Giovanni (Francisco Marsó), in whose home he also lives along his mother
(Virna Lisi) treated almost like a servant for her transgression of marrying a
gentile who has abandoned her and the son, Ernesto is a seemingly precocious
child who has early on recognized his own sexuality agreeing, soon after hiring
him, to meet a laborer for a sexual encounter.
By
the time they actually reconnoiter, the stableman (as the script labels him)
has already fallen in love with the boy and elaborately discusses with Ernesto
not only his love but how he will refrain from hurting him, allowing the
Ernesto to stop the process at any time if begins to hurt too much. The two
meet up several times after, the worker even purchasing from his paltry pay of
1 florin a day, sweets and the 1911 version of Vaseline for his young lover.
For his part, Ernesto appears to be a kind of rebel, insisting that he
is a socialist—admittedly to irritate his hated employer—and blithely ignoring
his uncle’s demands and admonitions. When his uncle determines to give up
smoking, he absconds with the cigar case, presenting it as a gift to his lover.
And when his uncle chastises him for having taken a hackney on his way to
collect a company debt, he accepts Giovanni’s walking stick as a sort of gift
to help him move about town in the manner which his uncle has demanded—on foot.
There is, in fact, a great deal of humor throughout the early part of this film with regard to Ernesto’s endless posturing as he pretends to obey yet utterly ignores the rules set up around him not only by his uncle and aunt, but by his ex-school companions—Ernesto has clearly dropped out of school in order to work at his uncle’s warehouse—who keep insisting that their virginal friend must find a woman or, at the very least, visit a prostitute.
Ernesto is almost charming in his often smug disobedience of societal conventions, appreciating a similar action by his older friend who, when after Ernesto has been in bed ill for a few days—a condition triggered by his over-consumption of alcohol with those same schoolboy friends—the worker visits him at home bearing a message purportedly from the warehouse, but actually simply seeking an opportunity to make contact with his younger lover.
Soon after, the boy attempts to show off his older lover in a kind of
public outing as the worker accompanies him on a boat which he has rented. But
mostly, Ernesto ignores his friend, giving little evidence of their romance,
despite the fact that he intensely shares eye contact with another nearby
boater, whom we later recognize to have been Ilio. If Ernesto may seem to be
flaunting convention in his public outing, we also recognize that he has chosen
a location, as they skim across the waters, in which no one might truly
recognize them.
In
fact, we quickly begin to doubt the boy’s rejection of the norms. When he
overhears a discussion his uncle has with a relative that a business colleague
has been discovered to have been having a secret affair with his male servant,
the gossip suggests that under the circumstances such a man has only one way of
redeeming oneself from the public scandal, to kill himself, which evidently the
man had already accomplished.
Upon overhearing this, the young rebel hesitantly determines finally
to visit the lovely prostitute he has seen leaning from her window; yet,
interestingly, he does not return even though, having paid her far too much for
her services, she insists she will keep his money for payment of further
visits.
Finally, Ernesto reveals his true commitment to the status quo when,
arranging for one last meeting with the day laborer, he demands that they turn
the tables so to speak, the boy fucking his older friend instead of receiving
his attentions. The worker has become so enamored with Ernesto that he agrees
to what surely must, within his working class codes, seem demeaning. Pulling
down his pants, he leans over the piles of sacks he and his friends have spent
their lives unloading, to await the boy’s penis. By the time he looks around to
witness his lover’s face, Ernesto has disappeared, never to return.
Unable to face the sexual situation that he himself has helped to create
and certainly enjoyed, he delivers a letter to his uncle announcing his
resignation from the job. Long committed to playing the violin, Ernesto is now
determined to devote himself to further studies or perhaps even teaching
younger pupils.
Furious with the turn of events, Giovanni demands a meeting during
which they share a conversation that is crucial to our outstanding of the
events that lie ahead. The angry uncle rushes up the stairs to his nephew
reprimanding him for trying to “teach him something”: “You can’t teach me
anything!” he shouts.
When
he calms down, he asks the boy whether or not he wants to leave because he
feels “trapped here,” a statement with which the boy concurs. Pacing, his uncle
acknowledges that he too feels trapped. “And I hate everything in here. The
letter book. The sacks. The apprentice. ...I’ve been stuck here for 40 years.”
“Why
didn’t you go?” asks his nephew.
“Go where? Where does one go?” He admits he has long been playing the
stupid boss, allergic to mothballs and cigars, just to amuse Ernesto. What does
the boy want to do with his life?
“Things that would surprise you,” argues Ernesto.
Becoming a violinist? The uncle doubts his success, suggesting that
after his travels and his adventures he will come back.
“What would you do if you were my age?”
“I forgot, when you’re young you’re sure of yourself. Don’t worry,
you’ll come to a halt all too sudden. Perhaps sooner than you think.”
In some respects, it is a commonplace discussion played out in hundreds
of such conversations between the generations. But in this instance, with the
older and bitter man facing the handsome, white-suited boy of so many talents
it appears to be particularly bitter, in part because we now recognize that
Ernesto is not truly a rebel, and cannot survive as a being working out of the
system.
In Samperi’s interpretation of Umberto Saba’s fiction we almost feel,
after this bleak prognostication of the hero’s future, that Ernesto may indeed
escape normative life, particularly when, at a violin concert, he meets the
beauty Ilio who hires the older boy to teach him violin, while simultaneously
seducing him into his bed.
Given the freedom this child of 13 is allowed by his doting mother and
father, it appears that Ilio and Ernesto’s relationship might have been easily
permitted until the younger boy was of
age, and might have developed into something that would free both of them from
the ever tightening coils of this dying society.
The problem is that Ilio also has a twin sister, Rachele (also played by
Wendel) who knowing what is going on between Ilio and Ernesto, determines to
also seduce the violin teacher. Somewhat as in Harold Prince’s film Something
for Everyone—a film released coincidentally the very same year as
Bertolucci’s The Conformist—the ménage à trois might have
succeeded, particularly since, as the twins insist, they used to dress up in
each other’s clothes successfully eluding the detection of even their parents
on every occasion.
Yet as the elder Luzzatis begin to notice the interest of their daughter
in the good-looking violinist, they take things into their own hands,
and—before any of the three younger beings can work out the tensions involved
in their shifting relationships—determine to announce their permission for
Ernesto and Rachele to marry.
The
spin of events immediately wins the approval of Ernesto’s family, the Wilders
recognizing that the Luzzatis represent more wealth and aristocratic
credentials than do they, and accordingly they further push Ernesto into the
whirl of parental ambitions.
As
he is about to be driven away in an open carriage to the party, Ernesto is met
by his earlier lover who humbly greets him, “Ernesto, how are you?” Ernesto
pretends not to know him, handing him a florin, which the worker, almost in
tears, passes on to a nearby urchin playing in the streets.
At
the affair itself, the somewhat late-arriving future groom looks wan, seeking
out Ilio who in anger has previously stormed off. He chats once more with his
uncle who reminds him of the boy’s earlier question: “What would do if you were
my age?” Giovanni continues, delivering one of the most terrifying lines
perhaps ever spoken to a young man: “Now we are the same age.”
A
few moments later as the celebrants toast to the couple’s relationship, Ernesto
turns away from them to look directly at the camera, closing the film with a
ridiculous shrug of his shoulders.
The
New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder, writing on the film in 1983 when
it was released in the US, argues “when Ernesto turns wordlessly toward the
camera in the midst of his engagement party...[he]...indicates that neither
marriage nor the years to come will subdue the rebel within.”
For me, however, that shrug seems not at all to be an indication of his
would-be rebelliousness but rather a gesture of his acceptance of fate, as if
to suggest, “what can you do?” If I would like to imagine that Ernesto is
hinting at an attitude of possibility as in “we’ll see,” given his previous
actions we have witnessed he is what his former employer has confirmed: Ernesto
is a conformist who one day as an old man in the future is destined to look
back, like Giovanni, with regret for having denied his love of Ilio and the
working friend both.
Ernesto, like Clive Durham of E. M. Forster’s Maurice who lived
through the very same period portrayed in this film, sacrifices his sexuality
to societal acceptance and approbation. This young man will never feel the need
to put a gun to his head, for he is already dead.
Los Angeles, December 10, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (December 2020).
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