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).

 

Douglas Messerli | The End of Love [essay]

the end of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Since time immemorial religion, the state, and personal beliefs have worked singularly and often hand-in-hand to find ways to restrict, redefine, limit, and even ban various forms of love heterosexual, homosexual, and any other expression available to human beings. For some absurd reason, one of the most joyful, healing, and regenerative of all human expressions and emotions has constantly been the source of fear, terror, and even hatred for some parts of the population, as if sharing pleasure were the most dangerous of possibilities. And well it may be. As the gatekeeper to the State-run “Permission to Love” certificates whispers to one of his disappointed applicants: Don’t you see? Love creates passion, the freedom and confidence to threaten their [the State’s] power.”

    Religion cast most of sexual activities as a sin except in the modest expression that went toward producing new bodies for the church. And individuals from the beginning of time were jealous and frustrated that others were more attractive, sexually gifted, and just personally appealing as sexual partners than themselves, leading them to strongly support State and Church restrictions.

    Understandably, dozens of major films have dealt with these subjects from the very earliest of gay films, Different from the Others, which the central character is being blackmailed for his love of a younger man to the hundreds of the later 20th and early 2lst films that showed how religious culture infected families who stood against their old children for various loves not readily permitted by their beliefs. Even the education institutions, supposedly bastions of open-mindedness, worked with the State and religious organizations in helping to delimit what can be expressed of love—at the very time when human beings are hormonally most intrigued to explore their passions.

    Christ, who espoused love as being the most important of human behaviors was killed for that very reason. And isn’t Romeo and Juliet, after all, simply another attempt to control and delimit the expression of youthful love. Even normative heterosexual love was perverted by envy and just plain evil forces in Othello. The Romantics spent long hours in confusing their intense feelings of love with death. Love, so the ending of King Kong insists, even killed the powerful beast.

 

     Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did it seem possible for a few decades that love, in all his forms and expressions, might prevail. Hair (1979) was not just an expression of the body growth atop one’s head, under one’s arms, and around and beneath the chin, but about the rapture of the body itself.

     And then AIDS and a return to the conservative times in the US of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes destroyed that momentary revolution.

     Although he LGBTQ community had most certainly made incredible strides in convincing the world that differing sexualities were not a threat to heterosexual love; in fact, their very existence did continue to threaten the patriarchal versions of straight love, and we always knew the Church and State might rise up again at any moment to threaten any concepts of open love.

     Even before the first election of Donald Trump, a man who has attempted to cover up his own pedophilia through the embracement of the religious and social prejudices against sexual difference, gay filmmakers, in particular, begin to perceive a new breed of men and women, who oppose any but the most selfish forms of love, mocking empathy, fellow feeling, or any other form of sexual expression except patriarchal heterosexuality, feared that we might be approaching a new dystopia, not only a political theocracy or brutal dictatorship, but one that called adamantly for the “end of love” as we know it. Perhaps these was always an ongoing undercurrent of these kind of predictive works, particularly the numerous films which actually dealt head-on with the growing hate that gay men suffered in the earliest years of AIDS. But their focus, understandably, was on the disease and the lack of human response to it, not to the larger forces demanding the end of all non-progenitive sex.

      Already in 1997, the always prophetic French director François Ozon in See the Sea featured an unstated battle between a sensualist woman and a new breed of female dominated by her hate of sex and act of copulation who acts out only her personal obsessions through other means which includes destroying those who exhibit caring, love, and sensitivity.

     The very next year, the wonderful director of short gay puzzlements, Canadian filmmaker Wrik Mead, questions whether love might have ended forever in a gay bar in which the drunken Cupid himself accidently was struck down with one of his own arrows.

      In 2010 alone, two more such works appeared, the first, Dennis Hensley’s The Rubdown, joked about a rather minor restriction of a massage chain demanding the covering at all times during the massage of the male and female nipples and what lay beneath; featuring a gay undercover agent who is sent out to check to make sure the masseur is following the new strictures, hoping we will obey them while wishing simultaneously that he might break the rules just this once.  

     In the second film of that year, Christopher Ludgate’s The Love Permit dives more directly in a dystopian nightmare wherein the State need approve any attempt a making love through its requirement of permits which it not so secretly is no longer granting.

    In 2021 Brazilian filmmaker Madiano Marcheti’s Madalena presented a world in which anyone whose sexual differences became too noticeable suddenly disappeared in the vast agricultural fields around which clumped the thousands of small matching field worker’s homes who helped Brazil to feed it masses while turning its own people into ghosts, permitting their young hardly any expression of sexual joy, and allowing very limited sexual difference.

    That same year saw a series of short dystopian films. In Harry Weston Two Birds in a Cage a small Australian suburb cannot even permit the sympathetic hugging of a straight man and his gay friend, the straight boy later being punished by a beating and perhaps death.

    In a complete reversal of the usual pattern, a gay boy, afraid of losing the love of a new boy in town, invites the boy over to his homes and locks him away in a basement dungeon so that they will be “together forever,” the name Kass McLaws’ film of that name. Here torture and punish are doled out in the name of love and a fear of losing it that is every bit as strong as the fear of demented heterosexuals afraid of difference kids of expressions of love.

    Also in 2021, the short film a Bloom, South African filmmaker Anthony Rangel Coll reminds us of the terrifying dystopian world in parents often place their children in submitting to the care of conversion therapists, reminding us of Kerstin Karlhuber’s Fair Haven (2017), Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased of 2020 documentary Cured, ending as in the latter two earlier films in the suicide of a central character.

    Taking us back to dictatorial government’s like the Soviet Union which attempted to outlaw homosexual behavior Peter Rebane takes us back to a military base in the Soviet occupied Estonia to reveal to Soviet governmental and social repression which continues today in Russia in his gay soap opera Firebird (2021), while Máté Konkol’s Budapest, Closed City (2021) shows us the results of current Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s racist and homophobic policies. Both of these works, in turn can only remind us of earlier cinematic representations about the Nazi attempts at LGBT eradication in films such as Bent (1977), Pink Triangles (1982), Paragraph 175 (1999), and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021), the latter film of which I also include in these pages.

    Even when it is not nationally decreed, the social order can create a world in which young gay lovers are not permitted to survive, as in Guiseppe Fiorello’s beautifully moving Scillian dystopia, Fireworks which resonates—perhaps unknowingly—with Kenneth Anger’s 1947 masterwork by the same name.

    By 2024 French directors Nathalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh had already perceived and assimilated just what the kind of world Trump imagined might truly look like in the truly dystopian tragedy, Two People Exchanging Saliva. In this film not only had love been erased but even it’s emblem, first evidence, and entry, the kiss itself. To those who even might wish to explore it, foretold in Ludgate’s earlier work, Eros had at last had become redefined as Thanatos.

    Love of all kinds has been threatened throughout history, but for LGBTQ figures it almost goes with the territory. As Vito Russo made clear in The Celluloid Closet death is how most gay men and women end of any film which bothered even to represent them.

    Yet the works I include here were all made after Stonewall, the symbol of the supposed end of gay prejudice in the USA. Yet we all know it is only an emblem, that reality continues to be a world in which gay men and women still find themselves often marked by local community haters, and is subject to major social of government shifts in sentiment. Today transgender individuals are under even greater torture and punishment than many gay men and lesbians were in the previous century. In many states they no longer have any legal rights to be who they are—a deeply existential statement—but must return to their birth names and the reality that surrounded their youthful non-existence; they are refused licenses, the permission to vote, and even the simple access to appropriate bathrooms, denied even the permission to dress as the gender by which they define themselves. Transsexual individuals have also been denied their flexible shifts in identity, drag queens, long individuals who were most able to move between the heterosexual and homosexual worlds in their satire of and disregard of gender definition, are denied in some states their performances or even socially conscious activities such as reading to children in libraries. And we all know that the rightest groups in many countries are working hard to take back the rights gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have demanded and won over the years, banning books and educational services so that younger people cannot even find a way out of their confusion of sexual identity.

     For queers, the end of love has always been just around the corner, lurking to deny their own passions, pleasures, identities, and deep love. We have been forced into an almost paranoid view of our positions in society, believing at times that perhaps a veneer of heterosexual-like marriage and family life might wipe away all prejudice, but being, nonetheless, to be always wary perceiving that the façade might just as quickly turn on us or actually corrupt our true identities and widely and sometimes wildly loving beings. Perhaps, Wrik Mead was right; we are all cupids infected by our own commitment to love.

     The works I have chosen in this small collection are just a sampling of the many such feature and shorter dystopian cinematic representations of our societies since the so-called liberations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, freedoms quickly squelched in the terrible AIDS epidemic of the 1980s-the early years of the new century, and which continue to be denied today. Yes, since 2015 we can even marry, but don’t imagine for a moment that individuals, governmental officials, and judges of the courts aren’t waiting in glee for the opportunity to again deny those rights. There are still laws on the books banning same-sex marriage in 26 states. All the Supreme Court has to do is to return the law to State regulation and many thousands of US citizens would be banned from the right to love those with whom they live.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).