Lorenzo Caproni | La tana (The Den) / 2015

the games men play

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo Caproni and Fabio Marson (screenplay), Lorenzo Caproni (director) La tana (The Den) / 2015 [15 minutes]

 

Italian director Lorenzo Caproni’s 2015 short film The Den reminds me a great deal of the Israeli film Summer Vacation (2012), in which a man with his wife encounters on his vacation at the beach and hidden gay lover whom he can’t abandon, despite the presence of his wife and children.

     In The Den, Christian (Daniele Mariani), visiting the beach for a couple of days with his wife Barbara (Laura Sinceri) and son Giovanni, suddenly meets up with a friend from his past, Luca (Emanuel Caserio). He introduces him to his wife, who wonders when they met up. Both agree they used to play at the beach together as children.

     Both Christian and his family and Luca at the nearby campsite, and Luca quickly slips Christian his room number, 5A.

     But unlike the cheating couple of Summer Vacation, whose coupling involves nothing more than lust, Christian is involved with Luca in a far more nefarious way.

     Christian quickly finds a way to temporarily abandon his wife—he suddenly decides he will cook the evening meal, and leaves the beach to shop and prepare the ingredients. He quickly makes a beeline to cottage 5A wherein Luca awaits him, ready to be tortured into a manifestation of BDSM love. He’s reading for the usual S&M abuses, licking Christian’s boots, sucking his balls, licking his ass, getting spat on, etc. But in this coupling things goes much farther, mostly involving ropes.

     Before Luca can even wink at their campy rendition of youthful romance, Christian has stuffed a sock in his mouth, tightly tied him up, and left him on the floor of his room while he goes off to really cook spaghetti and clams.

     The next day even Christian’s son is not entirely safe as, watching Giovanni play in the sand, the father suddenly usurps his child’s play bucket and begins to pack it up with sand, bringing it back to his son clearly reminding him of a game he once played as a young man with Luca, perhaps burying him (an image that also, strangely enough, plays a role in Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon’s Summer Vacation).

    The musical score throughout consists of a sound like knives clicking together or in this scene, a kind of primal drum beat, making it clear that Christian is compelled to behave in this semi-violent manner, that it is a force from within that beyond the seemingly normal and loving relationship with his wife and son, might at any moment devour him.

    He immediately returns to 5A, unbinds Luca, pulls the sock from his mouth a feeds him a drink of water and pours the remainder on his face while now verbally abusing him. After even further physical abuse he does finally rest his ass on Luca’s face. It is clear that he is so disgusted by his homosexual desires that the only way he can engage in them is to turn the other into an animal demanding physical engagement and abnegation. Finally, he brutally face fucks his “prisoner.”

    Meanwhile, we watch Barbara either literally or mentally wandering the sandy dunes near the beach, obviously in search of her husband’s recent actions and apparent compulsions.

    Back on the beach again with his wife and son, Christian finally claims he has to leave a night early, that work calls him home, obviously seeking a way to be free o his family to spend at least one night with Luca alone.

   Barbara wonders whether or not his work partner, Paolo cannot simply wait another day for Christian’s return to the office.    

    “Maybe,” Christian responds.

    Meanwhile, it is clear that Christian has again tied up Luca and left him alone in the pains of ropes and muzzle. This time when Christian returns he finds Luca sick, unable to even eat what Christian offers.

    Back at the beach again with his little family, Christian suddenly looks up to see what appears to be an escaped Luca, shirt torn, and looking grisly, walking toward him. Luca lies down on the sand near him.

    For the first time we actually hear a chord of music before it returns to its primal silent and distant beat. The “affair” between the two men may have be temporarily resolved, but the compulsions remain in the heart of this supposed “family man.”

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).