Mauro Bolognini | Giovani mariti (Young Husbands) / 1958

the perverted innocent

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mauro Bolognini, Enzo Curreli, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Luciano Martino, and Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay), Mauro Bolognini (director) Giovani mariti (Young Husbands) / 1958

 

Mauro Bolognini is one of the least known in the English-speaking world of the great Italian directors of the mid-20th century. Some of his most important works were fairly early in his career when we worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini as one of his regular co-authors. Indeed several of his films have similar themes to Pasolini’s Accatone (1961), while recognizing his own and Pasolini’s debt to Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953) and even Marcel Carné Les Tricheurs (The Cheaters) (1958) and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) (1960), all of which actually depict homosexual characters.

    At least three of Bolognini and Pasolini’s collaborations have some significance to the LGBTQ community, particularly Bolognini’s 1959 film La Note brava (The Big Night). That film, in particular, actually represents what his other films such as La Giornata balorda (From a Roman Balcony) (1960) and the earlier Giovani mariti (Young Husbands) (1958) only hint at, that without female companionship these heterosexual males were perfectly content to enjoy sex with one another.

      I have not included a review of From a Roman Balcony in these volumes simply because the central character’s activities are played out in a vacuum most of the time, without the intense male companionship of the other works, and accordingly his heterosexuality becomes the dominant theme, despite subtexts which locate his activities in a world similar to those of the all-male bonding groups of The Big Night and Young Husbands.     

     The five “Lions,” as they describe their pack, are also heterosexual males, and indeed the central fiction of the film focuses on their search for and discovery of suitable wives. Moreover, these provincial city boys—some of the scenes were filmed in Lucca, Tuscany—are much better off financially than the male groups of Fellini’s early work, Visconti’s poor village brothers, the petty criminals of The Big Night, or the aimless drifters of Pasolini’s own directorial debut. And they can apparently afford the occasional prostitutes of which they take advantage. These boys play tennis and are all members of a sports club which provides them with after Mass: Sunday drinks at the bar, swims in the club’s pool, or sneaking kisses with girls in the club’s gardens. Although we rarely see their parents or their home life, we believe, just as we find it hard to imagine in The Big Night, that both exist. Some of these boys read poetry, translate works from Latin, and have skills far beyond the day laborers we witness in Accatone or The Big Night.

     Yet that makes these five friends seem all the more like Peter Pan’s lost boys, perhaps with the high spirited and energetic Franco as their leader. Certainly, he is the first to spur them on from adventure to adventure—first to the pond where they all strip to their underwear and jump in, one of their group losing his underpants in an obvious prank; to join up with the passing band of boy musicians (much like the way the central gang join up with others in The Big Night before their grand male orgy); and to speed off to Dente’s, where they get the elderly chef out of bed to serve up omelets—and later beautifully dances the Merengue on the other side of the canal from where his friends walk.

     If these closely bonded male friends seem to talk incessantly about women, it is mainly simply a topic familiar to young heterosexuals, but is simultaneously meaningless: they place their love for one another beyond everything else. And, however, they perceive themselves, the lions live in a homoerotic pack where women are simply insubstantial desires which they assure themselves they can abandon on a moment’s notice; when one of them gets seemingly too attached, the others step in to attempt to break it up, the process we later observe when the kind-hearted Marcello falls in love with Lucia (Antonella Lualdi).

      The narrator of their history is Antonio (Franco Interlenghi), also the group poet. And the first action that we observe of the film begins with a handsome young man standing against a dark wall on a backstreet during the opening credits. He appears to be a kind of hustler, perhaps a male prostitute waiting for a client. A passing woman even attempts to pick him up, as his proving our theory, but at that very moment the other four members of the “Lions” show up, shooing away the woman and teasing the boy against the wall, who turns out to be Antonio’s brother Guilio (Raf Mattioli), who they describe as “the innocent.” However, we realize that indeed he has been waiting for a pick-up—his four other male friends.

     Antonio quickly establishes the major characteristics of the others. Franco (Ennio Girolami) is the “crazy one,” “merriest and happiest of them all”; the handsome Ettore (Antonio Cifariello) is “the woman’s idol; and perhaps the most decent and nicest of the group, a boy desperate to leave his provincial town, Marcello (Gérard Blain) is characterized as “last in races, first in love,” the kind of boy every woman is seeking. Antonio doesn’t immediately reveal himself, hiding it until the very last scene.       

      The swimming scene, one of the first major events of the film, clearly establishes the homo-eroticism that is the glue to their relationship. They can hardly wait to strip down and jump into the cold water where the frisk together in utter abandonment, in a kind sexual idyll, broken only  when the always impetuous Franco suddenly appears back on shore. But even there he continues to entertain them, as they slowly dress, exposing his nakedness to the group as he climbs high into the nearby tree, establishing their animalistic passion.

       He quickly backs that up, as I have already suggested, by his joining up with a group of boy musicians, and leads them all on to their ritual midnight feast. But mostly what they are seeking is attention, not particularly of the sleeping townspeople, annoyed with their late night antics, but of one another, each by each establishing their own howl and adjusting to the sound to the others. They are still boys playing at the jungle adventures of their own fairy tales. Their goal is to remain in stasis, never becoming too infatuated with the other sex to truly endanger their companionship, a situation that even in these early scenes we know, as do they, cannot be maintained given their levels of testosterone, unless they do actually turn to one another for sex. As determined as they are to remain together forever, they realize that it, like all their other actions, is a mere bluff.

From left to right: Antonio, Franco, Ettore, Marcello, and Guilio

 

     And before they can even comprehend what’s happening, their leader suddenly marries a local beauty, Donatella (Rosy Mazzacurati). It was Peter Pan after all that brought a girl into the lost boys’ world and fell in love with her himself. But even their wedding serves still for the others as mere entertainment, and they can’t wait until Franco gets back to share his sexual experiences with them.    

     When they discover, a few weeks later that he has been back in town for several days without contacting them, they appear confused, the void having already had an effect. It appears that the noted lover of the group, Ettore is growing too close to another of the town’s beauties, Laura (Isabelle Corey). But in this case none of the remaining Lions needs to intercede, as her own immaturity succeeds he keeping him away, she not only playing hard to get, but slapping him when he attempts to kiss her in the bushes at the club. 

       The visiting Mara Rossi Bandelli (Sylva Koscina), the wealthy daughter of a city mayor who has a car that all the Lions eye with envy, happens to be at the club taking in the sunshine, and Ettore determines to attempt to seduce her, showing off his body as he dives in for a swim. They soon develop a relationship in which she is far more in control than he, but her distance further intrigues him. And certainly she has few of the young girl antics of Laura.

      Meanwhile, the Lions have attempted to visit Franco, only to be turned away at his door, he explaining that Donatella is offended by their ruffian behavior. Something indeed has changed, and they grow even angrier about their former “leader” when a job that has been promised to Marcello has, through the intervention of Donatella’s father, been given to Franco. The boys gather once more to confront Franco, only to have him explain that Donatella is pregnant and he needed a job, and that he himself had not been involved in the decision. Surely they cannot resent him for attempting to be a good husband and soon-to-be father? They turn away, realizing they have lost their “hero” forever, all of them vowing to cut off all women and sex.

       The new creed, however, doesn’t last long before Marcello meets a lovely newcomer to the city, a truly sweet, unspoiled, and intelligent girl, Lucia (Antonella Lualdi) whose father runs a local mental institution. It is here that the Lions show how they attempt to break up relationships in order to keep their members free for their own personal enjoyment. Antonio describes, given Ettore’s distractions and Giulio’s interest in literature and the movies, that he was the only one able to take on the task. Meeting up with the two on a date, Antonio, Ettore, and Franco take over conversing with Lucia, while assigning Franco’s now young son to Marcello, forced to drag behind them as the boy asks for other diversions and expresses a need to urinate which Marcello won’t permit.

       Antonio later even arranges to have a date with the girl, who mysteriously accepts—primarily, we soon discover, just to test herself with the other local boys. She discovers through Antonio’s insistence that basically all women are alike, but that she is different, a kind of empty affection that doesn’t at all interest her, as she suddenly dismisses him, making it quite clear that she is truly in love with Marcello. The breakup of Marcello’s love affair is a horrible failure. Even the fact that he thought he had shared poetry with her is an illusion; she knows poetry only because her father loves it.

        Guilio, we later discover, is helping Laura translate Sallast, and it is apparent he has a crush on her; but all she can do is make phone calls to her friend Ornella (Anna Maria Guarnieri) to talk about Ettore, desperate to know where he goes and what he does since that fateful slap that seems to have separated them. She attempts to share expressions of love she is reading in a fiction by Françoise Sagan, but Guilio appears to find the expressions of female love as “statements she should have kept to herself,” Laura suggesting that “Not everyone is like you,” a hint perhaps that he may in fact be gay, possibly confirmed when he later, in attempting to reveal his love for her as his ideal of a woman, that he has never had sex with a female. But, in fact, his love for her genuine, simply lost in her infatuation with Ettore, which ends finally when the girl’s idol decides to marry Mara, primarily for her money—a decision that seems to shock all of the Lions and their girlfriends.

      At the wedding, where everyone expected Laura to make a huge public display, she is suddenly freed when the couple give their vows, rediscovering the love of Guilio of which she has previously seemed oblivious.

      Time does not simply pass in this tale, but rushes forward, as we suddenly find ourselves at the christening of Mara and Ettore’s son, named after all of the Lions. At the club after the event, the now disbanded pack determine if only for one night to restore their youth, their male camaraderie, and the unspoken love behind it with one final fling on the town. This time crowded into Mara’s convertible with Ettore at the wheel, they race through the city much as in the early scenes when they ran on foot, loudly proclaiming their territory. Once more they strip off their pants and jump into the pond to splash around. Franco climbs the tree a pretend a Tarzan-like ape while showing off his hairy blonde physique to the gang of undressed boys below. Yet he fears that his son may be ill and is worried because he is not home to hear to him cry and come to his aid.

       Marcello secretly confesses to Guilio that the next morning he will be leaving for a job in Milan, traveling away from Lucia so that he might make enough money and return one day to marry her. Guilio himself is sick from being separated for Laura, whom he now plans to marry, and eventually leaves the group, as he has many times in the past, early. Their minds are clearly elsewhere.

       The Lions rush to Dente’s for breakfast but our told by his young daughter that he has died. After a few more loud spins through the town leaves them empty, they are left with only one final remnant of the past. They pick up three prostitutes and take them to the sports club. There the women drink, dance, and kiss the now disinterested boys, while in the background Harry Belafonte’s hit Banana Boat Song plays on the jukebox, telling us what the boys clearly feel:

 

Day-o, day-o

Daylight come and me wan' go home

Day, me say day, me say day, me say day

Me say day, me say day-o

Daylight come and me wan' go home

       Franco, now truly worried about his son, is the first to pull away; and when Antonio badmouths Lucia, Marcello slugs and also leaves. As a woman arrives to throw everyone out of the illegally opened club house, the girls get into a violent cat-fight, and Ettore finally slinks off, driving the car back to the money which he has married.

      Only Antonio, our storyteller, remains alone, drunk, and obviously with no one to go home to. He alone has remained true to their creed of no serious commitments to the opposite sex. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Antonio is actually gay or secretly closeted, having lived for those precious moments with his close friends. In this provincial city, Antonio is virtually without anyone with whom to have sex. Even more than his brother Guilio and despite any of his numerous dealings with the opposite sex, he is still the real virgin, a man who has not found joy and love in the sexual act. Oddly, he is a kind of perverted innocent, a deluded boy who has totally been convinced that true love existed in the male bonds he had forged with the other boys instead of the arms of a woman.

      As if we needed evidence of the true force of the adolescent Peter Pan myth in these men had believed, Bolognini and his writers add a coda that lies outside of Antonio’s telling, where Marcello and Lucia on a bus on his way to the train that will take him away to Milan, discuss their worries about being separated, their love for one another, and, strangely, the continual pull that Marcello feels for his love of his friends. What he seems to regret even more than leaving Lucia is that he has not been able to say goodbye to the other Lions, and that while they are sleeping he will have disappeared into a new “other,” adult life. When he shouts out “Goodbye Fatty,” the name of the whore they invoked whenever they ran through the town’s main square, even Laura grows jealous of his ghosts, particularly Antonio and his other friends. Despite being their last moments together, Marcello quotes the lines from the poem Antonio’s quoted:

 

                                         O, love listen

                                         to your sweetheart’s tale

                                         Pain a man will suffer

                                         when friends abandon him

 

     She assures him, as he previously has her, that he will soon be back. But his last words suggest his anguish at having lost their love more than the fear of losing hers: “Yes. But for now everything’s over, and we haven’t said farewell,” the last words of the film. Marcello is in tears less for the loss of the woman he loves than for the boys he leaves behind.

       Today, Bolognini’s quiet film about the end of male camaraderie hardly seems like a very forceful statement about male/male friendships let alone about homosexual love. Yet in 1958 for those who knew how to read such films, Young Husbands was a strong statement, and it appears that there was some homophobic reaction even to this story about heterosexual marriages.

    The film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, winning cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi the Silver Ribbon (Nastro d’Argento) for the Best Cinematography. In 1977, Bolognini remembered in an interview with French journalist Jean Gilli, however, the circumstances of the day, recalling that he faced a certain hostility on the part of producers and fellow directors for his partnership with Pasolini. 

 

“Take the opening night of Giovani Mariti as an example, at the end of which no applause was heard and everyone avoided talking to me. Only Federico Fellini asked me ‘But why do you do these things?’”

     Gradually, Bolognini realized that what bothered everyone was the dialogues written by Pasolini. It was then that he decided to continue the partnership. And the very next year the two would make a film about similar young male relationships in which homosexual activity would be far more obvious.

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).