Marco Filiberti | Il compleanno (David's Birthday) / 2009

various and nefarious forms of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco Filiberti (screenwriter and director), Il compleanno (David's Birthday) / 2009

 

On one level Marco Filiberti’s feature film David’s Birthday is a psychological study featuring a pair of Roman couples, Matteo (Massimo Poggio), and his wife Francesca (Maria de Medeiros) and Diego (Alessandro Gassman) and his wife Shary (Michela Cescon) who have long been close friends. In the first scene they share a box at the opera from where Shary spots her itinerant brother Leonard (Christo Jivkov), whom she dearly loves, but is been nearly constantly on the move in his job as a photography, but has now returned to Rome.

     Visiting her brother’s box during the intermission, Shary convinces Leonard to join the quartet on their annual vacation spot at a beach house at the foot of Mount Circeo, a promontory of a small archipelago of four islands, Ponza, Palmarola, Zannone, and Gavi off the southwest of Italy.

     Since this is, in part, a psychological study featuring, in fact, a psychoanalyst Matteo, perhaps it would be useful to begin a quick summary of its five major figures. Matteo is an intellectual who has worked hard to go his own way and as such stands somewhat apart from most of the others, in particular his young wife Francesca who feels quite inferior to her husband and, accordingly, remains somewhat apart and cold to him despite her deep life. They share a young daughter who quite early in the work is shipped off to her uncle and aunt’s house since they have children closer to her age. While he is on the islands, Matteo still returns to the mainland, on occasion, to treat one of his special patients, a noted Latin teacher who cannot seem to be able to control her hatred of her Barbie-like daughter (more of her later).

    Shary is an intelligent and forceful woman who is married to the man-child Diego, a macho fool who has played little part in raising their now teenage son, and who instead of seeking out his own career has simply given into his father’s demands and joined his firm where he is quite unhappily employed. His lack of sophistication is made evident even in the earliest of scenes when Matteo argues there is too much Schopenhauer in Wagner’s opera, Diego responding “Where?” while the others giggle in response. Because of his childlike behavior and his lack of intellectual pursuits he is jealous of his friend Matteo and somewhat unhappy also in his marriage, since Shary has devoted most of her attention to raising their son David, placing him in a good university in New York City.

     I should also add that in his selfish and childish behavior Diego has been regularly unfaithful to Shary who has invested her love in David and Leonard. Still, when the two join in sex most evenings, it is with lust and passion, while Matteo and Francesca only occasionally have sex, which sometimes seems to almost mock a rape of the someone frigid Francesca.

     David, returning to Italy after several years for the summer, also plans to join the quartet and his uncle Leonard.

     For his part Leonard is presented rather vaguely; all we really know about him is that he has lost his wife Isabelle, whom apparently he passionately adored, to suicide and is still suffering the consequences.

     Accordingly, these variously unhappy figures, represent the perfect mix for a melodramatic few weeks together, as if they wandered in from some Nordic country instead of being native to Rome. Indeed, the opera they attend in the first scene is, if not precisely Nordic, based of the Medieval Celtic romance reinterpreted by Richard Wagner in his Tristan and Isolde.

     If nothing else that opera explains the slow pace of this actually quite simply plotted film. And clearly it at the heart of what happens to shift the entire focus away from the quartet once the now truly handsome young boy, David arrives, now a truly beautiful grown teen (Thyago Alves), such a stunning beauty, in fact, that he has already served as a model for a swimwear company.

    Almost immediately, we see the deep love, nearly incestuous, between mother and son, as Shary almost consumes him with kisses and touches. But then everyone is impressed by his looks, particularly the young island girls who attempt almost immediately to date him and force him into relationships.

    Yet the most fascinated of David’s admirers turns out to be a man he has practically known as his uncle, Matteo, who is clearly stunned by the beauty and from the moment he encounters him in their pool can barely focus on anything else. He watches, gets drunk, pouts, and suffers long periods of sexual frustration and guilt for the rest of this tale.

    The strange behavior Matteo exhibits from almost the moment he lays eyes on David causes deep tensions between all of the adult vacationers, particularly Francesca who interprets his even greater distance from her as being yet another sign of his intellectual hauteur.  

     Discovering the photos of David in swimwear, Diego, always the macho fool, is outraged that his son has been involved with such a feminine-like activity as modeling. He is quickly quieted by Shary, who reminds him that he has played almost no part in his upbringing, and whose course manners and narrow thinking are precisely what she has determined to save David from in sending him away for a superior education. But later he observes that his son abnormally turns away all the girls that he seems to kiss without engaging in any normative sexual activity.

     At first, only Shary perceives something going on between her friend Matteo and her son, a suspicion that is quickly quieted, however, when she also observes David kissing one of the eager young girls as he momentary hangs out with the younger crowd on the islands.

     What we just a suddenly perceive, however, is that David is not at all interested in the mindless woman chasing him, but is, in fact, quite intrigued by the attentions of his father’s best friend, Matteo. And one day, he suddenly breaks through Matteo’s voyeuristic stupor by inviting him to ride with him on a motorbike to the beach.

     That ride which quickly shifts from simple touches, to a deep bodily embracement by the rider of the driver makes it rather apparent that David is searching for the love not only of a sort of missing father, but of men in general.

      And so begins an almost jealous stalking of David by the now head-over-heels in love Matteo, who although at moments painfully attempts to keep his distance, simply cannot control his emotions, like Tristan fallen in love with his gay version of Isolde.

      As a psychiatrist, Matteo can easily comprehend and even justify his feelings, yet time and again he is blocked in his own intentions by the fact that several of his friends come to him for advice.

    On the beach he spots his patient who has been telling him of her hatred of her daughter, only to discover that she has been lying, that her child, in fact, is a mentally challenged boy with whom she performs a nearly incestuous relationship, not so very different from that of Shary and David’s.

      Leonard, it is hinted, may have actually been involved in his beloved Isabelle’s death, and hints as much to Matteo that he may have actually killed her in his veiled confession of having done something terribly wrong in the past that he will forever regret, appearing at the same time to caution Matteo from continuing what has perceived is occurring between him and David.

      About to leave for Sicily, he implores David to join him, perhaps just to lure him away from the dangers of Matteo’s love, but maybe because he himself is attracted to him. We have only to wonder whether he might not have killed his suicidal wife, who had already tried to kill herself several times, in order to free himself to be able to seek out another relationship, perhaps also homosexual. It is clear that David is quite attracted to him, and he is, after all, a quite comely man.

     David seems eager to join his real uncle, but his birthday is coming up and he has promised to celebrate it with his mother, father, and their friends, assuring Leonard that he will soon after join him in Sicily.

     But we also know that he is still intrigued by Matteo, perhaps even equally compelled—as if he too has taken a love potion—to play out the emotions between them.

     By now our psychological melodrama has transmuted into an entirely different genre, an operatic tragedy at the very moment that all the occupants of the villa, save our loving couple, have gone shopping for David’s birthday party.

     Having remained behind Matteo enters David’s bedroom where the two finally engage in a near-transcendent sexual encounter.

    Francesca, having finished buying the birthday cake, however, returns before the others. Having forgotten her keys, she cannot enter the building from the front gate, but most enter from the wing in which David’s bedroom is located. Hearing the groans of lovemaking, she opens his bedroom door to observe her husband ejaculating in the young boy’s ass.

     Rushing out of the building with her husband running after her naked, she races into the street only to be immediately struck down and killed by an automobile—nicely removing her from the scene.

     A day or so later, Shary, Diego, David, and Matteo are sitting around the communal table, all of them still in shock over what has occurred. Shary quietly directs a question to Matteo: where was he when Francesca was killed?

    All Matteo can do is openly break down and cry, admitting through his tears to Shary, if no one else, where he was on that awful day.

     If at least the gay men do not die in this version of impermissible and still rather unfullfilled love, we nonetheless feel the whole weight of Italian machismo in this now tragic cinematic tale. Like Leonard, Matteo and David both will perhaps have to face their intense guilt for having gone outside the cultural boundaries of love, even though Filiberti has made clear in his slow telling just how various and nefarious love is between all the individuals portrayed in his film. In this work there is no such thing as a pure and innocent form of love.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).