Marco Ferreri | Storia de Piera (The Story of Piera) / 1983

the doomed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Piera Degli Esposti, Dacia Maraini, and Marco Ferreri (screenplay), Marc Ferreri (director) Storia di Piera (The Story of Piera) / 1983

 

In this highly eccentric and beautifully filmed work, director Marco Ferreri and his writers introduce us to a family in which each individual seems at some point or another to lose their minds or at least break all roots with conventional behavior. The most interesting of these, and winner of the Cannes Best Actress award at the 1983 Cannes film festival, is Eugenia (Fassbinder’s great actor, Hanna Schygulla), who, although married to the hard-working Lorenzo (Marcello Mastroianni), who has married her for love and remains quite blindly still in love with her.

     Eugenia might be described in several ways, as a kind of early hippie, a wild being who simply cannot be and will not be sexually contained, or a sexually obsessed woman who has no comprehension at all of how to raise her family, daughter Piera (Isabelle Huppert) and son, the latter of whom we hardly get to know, he being raised up by a conservative servant in the house.

     It is Piera who serves as the focus of the film, first serving as her mother’s caretaker as she follows her about the city during behavior the literature on the film generally describes as “unbalanced.” Surely a mother fucking with abandon nearly every man she meets might be described as “unbalanced” or even emotionally unstable.

     Piera, accordingly gets a stranger vision of female sexuality as she moves from kissing contests with the local boys to her first encounters with young males and finally into the arms of a lesbian friend, to say nothing of the almost incestuous relations between both her mother and father. Both seem almost blind and certainly passive about each other’s activities, and in his job high up in the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista or PC), Lorenzo is absent from home for long periods. But even when he is home, tucked away in the rich rooms which cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri, at times, has made to look like the interiors from a Dutch painting, he appears nearly oblivious of his wife’s actions.

     Eugenia is finally deemed so beyond the normal that she is hospitalized and given shock therapy. And Piera escapes to Milan where she becomes a well-known actress.

      Upon a visit back home to one to Italian city of Latina, founded in 1932 by Benito Mussolini, Piera discovers that her father, forced to give up his job in the PC, has also been institutionalized. She finds him in bed with another man and a small dog, an uncaring attendant describing them as faggots. Lorenzo seems to have given up on almost on meaning, but is heartened again to see his now successful daughter.

       Soon after, her mother’s mind is so deteriorated that she is also locked away, refusing to even allow her hair to be cut and checked for lice. The arrival of Piera calms her just enough for a cutting and a trip to the beach where we have seen her early in the film have sex with one of her endless male encounters. There, she strips herself naked and demands Piera do the same as the two embrace in a deep expression of the love, confusion, and disappointment they have endured throughout.

      This is a very loosely constructed—one might describe it as haphazard—work that focuses instead on the constantly shifting worlds of this doomed but fascinating family.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Film blog (June 2025).   

Bruce LaBruce | No Skin Off My Ass / 1991

 playing roles

by Douglas Messerli

Bruce LaBruce (screenwriter and director) No Skin Off My Ass / 1991

 

With $14,000 and using himself and his then lover Klaus von Brücker as the major actors, now famed queer film director Bruce LaBruce created his first film, No Skin Off My Ass, which has since become a cult favorite and is recognized as an innovative, punk film, which Alexander Cavluzzo describes as “the voice of hardcore, tongue-in-cheek dissent with porn-packed political allegories.”

     It begins with LaBruce, described throughout as The Hairdresser, encountering for the second time in a day, what he believes to be a neo-Nazi skinhead (von Brücker), sitting a shiver at a local play yard bench.

     He offers him a room for the night, takes him home and provides him with a hot bath, while he explains that although he has a large clientele, and is successful businessman, he has grown less and less interested in his work as he has increasingly become obsessed by skinheads.

     Through this film, LaBruce gives us a close analysis of skinhead behavior, desires, differences, and purposes. What he doesn’t know is that actually this “skinhead” is not really a skinhead, but a young man who, as his sister Jonesy (G. B. Jones) reveals, often goes into his “bit,” in which for days at a time he grows mute, frustrating family and friends.

     LaBruce, not at all comprehending the strange boy his has picked up, despite his sexual desires, puts him into the guest room and retires for the night into his own room.

     The next morning the young “skinhead” escapes to visit his lesbian sister, Jonesy, who with her friends is making a documentary around the Symbionese Liberation Army.

     Von Brücker would also like to be in her film, for which she forces him to strip and seduce the lesbian women, all to utterly no success.

      Later, the “skinhead” has a dream about an S&M sexual situation involving The Hairdresser, who cuffs him and demands the young man roil around the bathroom stool. He returns to his so-called savior and again spends a sexless night, this happening for a period, before finally Jonesy makes a visit to the place, while The Hairdresser is entertaining a neighborhood or family child at the same play yard we saw earlier.

     He returns to encounter Jonesy berating her brother in his living room, she insisting that her brother is really gay and obviously is attracted to The Hairdresser, arguing they should simply admit that they are both gay, settle down and have sex.

      Some of LaBruce’s and von Brücker private sexual tapes follow, which in 1991 were considered pornography, but which today seem rather sexual tame. Yet, at least the two are finally a true couple, as the former Skinhead gets a moccasin hairdo while a punk band shouts out repeatedly, “Be a fag.”

     The two are finally a true couple, as the former Skinhead gets a moccasin hairdo while a punk band shouts out repeatedly, “Be a fag.” Indeed, the score throughout is utterly fascinating.              

     Jonesy admits that her film as never made because there was no financial backing, and she is now in trouble with the police for her graffiti works. She will probably have to leave town, she reports.

    According to LaBruce the film is "a queer retelling of Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park (1969). Altman’s film is based on the novel by Peter Miles. As LaBruce describes it, “Altman de-queered it, so I decided to re-queer it... When I showed the film for the first time in Los Angeles in 1991, somebody brought Miles to my screening and he said my no-budget Super-8 movie was better than the Altman version! He gave me an autographed copy of his novel inscribed: ‘You got it right.’"

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).