Davide Ferrario | Figli di Annibale (Children of Hannibal) / 1998

permanent outsiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Davide Ferrario and Diego Abatantuono (screenplay, based on a story Ferrario, Abatantuono, and Sergijo Rubini), Davide Ferrario (director) Figli di Annibale (Children of Hannibal) / 1998

 

Davide Ferrario’s comedy Children of Hannibal begins with a group of mostly unemployed workers sitting around a table outdoors near a workers’ food stop. They are discussing their options for employment and wonder what their friend Domenico (Silvio Orlando) might have planned, particularly since he has suggested that he intends to buy a motorbike. The long stringy-haired, slovenly ex-paint factory worker (we never learn whether he mixed paints, applied them, and simply sold paint) grunts instead of answering at the very moment a waiter brings him a paper back, inside of which is a gun. In the distance he spots a cat and rushes over to him, grabbing him up by the ruff, and in the very next scene, on a train heading North, has put the cat into a small cage.

     A moment later, Domenico stands in a city square facing four large Italian banks. Putting the gun under the cloth at the bottom of the cage, he enters the least officious of these, lifting up his cat in the cage as an excuse for not having put all metal objects into a container before being buzzed into the building. He immediately goes to a teller who reports that he closing the line for a banker’s meeting, something one might almost expect of a bank robber in a Woody Allen film; but our bungling hero pulls out the gun and insists that the teller nonetheless fill a bag with money.

     At the very same moment, a female bank guard draws a gun aimed at the would-be robber. With money bag in hand Domenico choses a stranger just entering the lobby from within the bank and puts the gun to his head, forcing the guard to toss down her gun.

     With his hostage Tommaso (Diego Abatantuono), Domenico exits the bank only to ask him if he has a car, Tommaso amazed that his stupid kidnapper has not even planned his get-away. He hurries him to his car as they speed off, on Domenico’s command, to Switzerland.

     Having driven only a few miles, the hostage tries to convince his kidnapper that going South would be the better route, but Domenico, who doesn’t like hot weather because has asthma, we latter learn, and wants to leave the country via Switzerland, without realizing that even his millions of stolen lire will not go nearly far in that country as it might in the South of Italy or, as we soon perceive to be the hostage’s desired destination, Africa—more specifically Egypt. Commanded to make the turn-off toward Switzerland, Tommaso takes off into another direction, South.

     Demanding he stop the car, Domenico forces his hostage out, but the stubborn Tommaso, frustrated with his kidnapper’s incompetence, easily pulls away the gun (which isn’t even loaded) and demands Domenico return to the car to travel with him to the South.

       On the way, he stops by an old night club/hotel/entertainment center, now in terrible decay. As a fairly successful businessman, he has just purchased it and hopes to return it to its former glory. Indeed, his visit to the bank was to get a loan; but they have turned him down, and he is now close to default. He attempts to share his dreams with Domenico of the glorious vision he has for restoring the place as if the bank robber were simply an investor, with the money Domenico has in his bag aching for just the right project.    

     In any event, he convinces his temporary captor that the police would have been waiting for him at the Swiss border, but wouldn’t at suspect that he’d turn around and go South—the route of Hannibal, the Italian conqueror whose darker blood, so the anti-racist Italians claim, is in most of the Italian race.

     So this wondrous on the road farce begins, as Tommaso first stops by his own house where, as he puts it, the bitch is fortunately still out. He manages to get the door open, but his wife keeps changing the burglar alarm code, remembering that she has changed it to their dog’s birthdate just in time before it goes off. At the house, he picks out a good-looking sports coat for Domenico to wear so that he won’t draw attention for the T-shirt he is wearing. He packs his suitcase. But at the next moment his teenage daughter Rita (Valentina Cervi) returns home and he is forced to explain that he is going away for a while, but will eventually help her to also “escape.” He insists that she tell her mother that she’s seen him. And they’re off.

    Along the way, in this infectious farce Tommaso forces Domenico to get a haircut, considerably improving his appearance. Eventually, as they reach the southern provinces, he stops for a police car, Domenico becoming terrified. But Tommaso only pulls out their bags, opens the police car’s trunk and puts them inside, explaining that the policeman, Orfeo (Flavio Insinna) is a friend.

     For a minute the two, Tommaso and Orfeo walk away a moment, as Domenico—now totally frustrated with how things have turned out—makes a call to a friend, attempting to explain what’s happened, telling him, “it’s complicated.” As he turns to look in the direction of the couple, he now notices them in a deep embrace, kissing. He turns back to his phone conversation, adding that it’s even more complicated than he can explain. So we discover that Tommaso and Orfeo are gay lovers which, when one recalls his financial situation, makes Tommaso a man who has been waiting for just such an opportunity that the confused worker has given him.

      Domenico, now a pawn, is taken to Orfeo’s aunt’s home, where Domenico and Tommaso must hold up, sharing a bedroom for a few days or perhaps weeks. The half-deaf aunt hasn’t a clue who her two guests are, having no radio or TV filled with reports about the robbery or a telephone—much to Domenico’s consternation, since Tommaso has tossed his cellphone away. As Tommaso heads to the beach, Domenico sneaks off to find a phone, speaking to his lawyer about what kind of sentence he might get and whether or not Italy has extradition rights in Egypt, in the process providing the police obviously with their whereabouts.

      Within days, Domenico has made friends with the aunt, with whom he gambles, using his stolen bank money as he loses time and again. Meanwhile, Tommaso arranges for a boat to take them to Egypt. To complicate matters further, however, Orfeo shows up with Tommaso’s daughter Rita, having found her in the train station. She has determined to join them, freeing herself from her mother’s (and father’s) bourgeois control of her life.

       Attempting to explain who Orfeo is, Tommaso indicates that Orfeo and Domenico are a “couple,” forcing the two to play the roles that Domenico has observed from his cohort. Domenico, now beyond any ability to be startled by new events, plays along nicely, but Orfeo is so angered by Tommaso’s denial of his existence and perhaps the closeted life they both have had to play for so very long that he threatens to break up with his real lover.

      Rita becomes interested in the relationship and begins to query Domenico on all sorts of personal aspects of his life: when did he first realize he was gay? how did he meet Orfeo and know it was love? etc, questions to which Domenico, good sport by now, attempts to answer.

       Finally obtaining, through Domenico’s phone-calling buddy, a three wheeled wagon, the trio moves on to the southern port where they are to meet a boat, but not before a final stop-off to see Domenico’s blind sister Carmela who is staying in an institution nearby. Wary of visiting her himself, Domenico sends Tommaso to check out her condition. Given the fact that the overweight and very angry Carmela greets him with a knife, Domenico has been correct in his fears. She is furious with her treatment at the institution and for his having helped to keep her there.

      The trip resumes, but they are soon stopped by police who this time are not friendly acquaintances, but demand their car registration and their identification—upon which Tommaso discovers Carmela has stolen his wallet—and believe that the hidden Domenico in the back to be an Albanian they are sneaking into the country. Fortunately, Orfeo again comes to their rescue, taking them in his car to the small port village where they put up for a couple of days in a hotel.

     It is there that Rita, sneaking into Domenico’s bedroom realizes that it is Orfeo and her father who are the “couple,” as she joins Domenico in bed.

     Tommaso and Orfeo make up, but he still cannot convince him to join them in their flight. When he returns to his own room to discover his daughter and Domenico in bed together, he becomes infuriated, ready to kill his former kidnapper, business-partner, "gay" buddy, and friend! Both Domenico and Rita attempt to explain that they sleeping in each other’s arms was other utterly innocent, and Rita turns the tables, so to speak, when she demands to know why her father hadn’t been honest about his relationship with Orfeo. She doesn’t at all mind that he has found his true love in the form of another man, but that he hasn’t shared it with her angers her, just as it has hurt Orfeo.

     But they hardly have the opportunity to assimilate their new set of relationships before Domenico’s sister Carmela also shows up, having escaped from her institutional “prison,” ready to join the gang.

     When they finally arrive at the pick-up spot, there is no boat there, and they wait with a storm rising on the horizon with nowhere further South to go. They have come to the end of the voyage.

     The boat (the “Federico Fellini”) does finally show up, helmed by a basically drunken sailor Ermes (Ugo Conti) who takes them most of the way before passing out.

     Seemingly stranded they are greeted by a much smaller vessel of immigrants from Africa to Italy heading in the other direction—the real “Hannibal’s children,” whereas these confused emigrants remain unsure of their destination. The Africans, given the increasingly nationalist positions rising at the time in Italy, may be refused jobs, passports, or even entry into some provinces, but surely will find their way to some spot in the European union, whereas we are not sure what might happen to the Italians seeking the leave their homeland.

      The film, in fact, does not show their eventual Egyptian arrival. We simply hear from them in letters and postcards as they quickly begin to run out of money (both having snuck 20 million each into Orfeo’s bag as they left him). They write of surviving on camel meat. And, at one point, one of asks Orfeo, that if he hasn’t yet spent the money, might he send some back to them. They await his arrival, although such a reunion has never been suggested in the plot. But in their disembodied voices we do hear the fact that, whether or not they like it, Tommaso and Domenico have become lifelong partners, who even consider the possibility of hitting up another bank.

    The haunting music for much of this film is provided by the Neapolitan hip-hop group Almamegeretta inviting Southern Italians to consider their ties to the Maghreb. But no serious implications occur in the film itself, as it is clear that neither Tommaso and Domenico feel at home in their newly adopted world, probably feeling as out of place as the immigrants we’ve seen on their way to Italy feel in the new country in which they’ve made their home. If both Italian characters begin the film as being portrayed as outsiders in their own country, they have now become permanent outsiders.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).