if the sea was whisky
by Douglas Messerli
If the sea was whisky and I was a diving duck
If the sea was whisky and I was a diving duck
I’d swim to the bottom and don’t know if I’d
come up
-L. Caston
and W. Dixon
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (screenwriter and
director) Il Mare (The Sea) / 1962
Almost all of the few dozens of
English-language critics who have found their way to view Giuseppe Patroni
Griffi’s 1962 film The Sea have acclaimed it as a work of genius. The
unnamed keeper of the significant film blog Cinema Sojourns begins his
long review, “Disconnected and Lost in Capri” by writing:
“When did alienation in modern society become
a favorite thematic concern in the culture and the arts, particularly in the
cinema? Certainly the films of Michelangelo Antonioni addressed the inability
of people to connect, feel or relate to each other in a post-industrial age
world as early as 1957 in Il Grido. But by the early sixties, it seemed
as if every major film director in the world was addressing the topic on some
level. A general sense of malaise was in the air as if the modern world was
having a counterproductive effect on humanity, creating a sense of futility,
amorality or complete apathy. You could see aspects of this reflected in
Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Ingmar Bergman’s Through a
Glass Darkly (1961), Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961),
Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1961) and Jean-Luc Godard’s My
Life to Live (1962). All of these are considered cinematic masterworks of
the 20th century but there are also many worthy and lesser-known contributions
to the pantheon of alienation cinema and one of the most strikingly is Il
Mare (The Sea), the 1963 directorial debut of Giuseppe Patroni
Griffi.”
He
goes on to say: “It is a remarkably self-assured directorial debut that bears
some similarities to Antonioni’s black-and-white trilogy (L’Avventura, La
Notte, L’Eclisse) in the way that conventional narrative is replaced
by a succinct visual approach to exploring character and setting. It may be too
abstract and plotless for some viewers but Griffi embues his film with an
underlying compassion and eroticism that is at odds with Antonioni’s more
enigmatic and dispassionate approach.”
That
Griffi’s work is also a complex study of a queer gay, perhaps bisexual love
tale long before it had become popular to explore this territory so
significantly makes it of special interest to LGBTQ-interested moviegoers. But
I warn those seeking the thrill of verboten gay love may not find what
they are looking for in this film of troubled psyches.
There is no question that the unnamed visitor to Capri played
by Italian actor Umberto Orsini (better known for his role in Luchino
Visconti’s 1969 work The Damned, a film also featuring Dirk Bogarde who
might well have performed Orsini’s role in this film) is searching for someone
to fulfill his sexual longing. He has come to Capri, alas, in the winter season
where hardly anyone but a few locals remain on this summer retreat of the rich
and famous. We get very few details about the intentions of any of the three
major figures of this movie, but we can deduce that the Orsini figure, who the
director gradually reveals is an actor (all of Griffi’s figures remain nameless
throughout the film so I shall have to designate them in my discussion by
assigning them the moniker of the actors who portray them), has come there to
meet up with a woman, perhaps his fiancée, who for reasons unknown never shows
up.
In
the early days of his visit, we follow the actor as he moves in and out of the
few open bars, restaurants, and streets, despondent in his search for something
that he clearly is unable to find. Instead of a summer sunny paradise, Capri is
cold, rainy, and empty, providing little but the sea, its noted rock
formations, its winding streets, and the stark beauty of this film’s
cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri’s black-and-white images to entertain the eye. The one
exception is a troubled but stunningly handsome young boy, personified by Dino
Mele, who the first time we see him is furious that the waiter has served him
ice in his drink—which we later come to learn must have been whisky, his
favorite way to relieve whatever tortures he has escaped.
The
third time the actor encounters the boy, one night on the street with Mele
standing against a wall with a bottle of whisky in his hand, Orsini—bored and
obviously sexually starved—steals the bottle from the young man’s grasp leading
to a struggle for its contents so intense that you know it cannot be the liquor
he desires as much as the body of the boy who holds its container.
Griffi’s entire work might be described as a grand series of metaphors,
where his characters struggle over control for something quite trivial which
stands for something associated with it. If there was ever a coded work, The
Sea is the exemplar. As the two beautiful men struggle over the bottle,
pulling it out of each other’s hands over and over again, which finally results
in them pushing and pulling each other’s bodies against the stucco walls, it is
apparent that their fairly violent contest expresses their sexual desires. They
do not want the bottle but he who holds it, and their violent wrestling does
not simply represent a playful tussle but a pantingly desperate attempt to paw
one another without entirely giving away their homosexual lust.
When they move on to Orsini’s hotel room, the game is played even more
earnestly as they chase each other around the room and into the bed with the
tantalizing bottle serving symbolically as the carrot-on-the stick when we know
the real lure is one another’s flesh. Finally their drunken orgy ends with
Orsini falling into another kind of the bed, the bathtub where he passes out
fully dressed, presumably from the alcohol but metaphorically out of exhaustion
for their sexual endeavors.
[An aside: in fact, probably neither of them is truly drunk from
alcohol. Mele, in fact, carefully teaches Orisini how to drink for pleasure
without getting drunk, sipping just a small amount of the liquid at a time, as
opposed to Orsini’s frenzied gestures to down it whole. Obviously, this is the
far-more experienced boy’s way of showing his elder how to enjoy sex, slowly,
teasingly eliciting the flavors of the body (both the body of Haigh’s whisky
and the body of the other male). This is probably not the first film wherein a
bottle of whisky symbolizes a cock.]
When the youth inexplicably fills the tub with water it is not simply a
gesture, as they pretend the next day, of attempted murder but symbolically
represents a wet dream beyond Orsini’s imagination. As he later crawls out of
the tub, almost slithering across the floor before pulling off his wet clothes,
we cannot help but imagine him saying the next morning: “I was so drunk last
night I don’t remember a thing that happened.” But clearly something of sexual
significance beyond his imagination has occurred between the two of them.
One need only note his immediate rush into the streets in search of Mele
the next morning. Without saying a word, Griffi and his cinematographer make it
apparent that the good-looking stranger to Capri has become obsessed, so
desirous of the young boy that, not being able to find him, he rushes up to the
only other visitor to this island, the newly arrived wealthy and attractive
woman, Françoise Prévost, embracing her and planting
a kiss on her lips. Rationally—although Griffi has utterly no intention of
maintaining any rational meaning in his work—he may have mistaken her as his
missing girlfriend, and hence his apparent embarrassment for his rash act. But
anyone who has ever known a deeply closeted gay man who has suddenly discovered
who he might really be perceives the act is a deliberate denouncement of his
recent aberration, an attempt to regain normalcy as quickly as he can.
Yet
if there is any shred of doubt left in the viewer’s mind that the Orsini figure
and Mele, the gorgeous kid, are now homosexually linked, we merely have to open
our eyes to Griffi’s manipulation of the camera as the two men share a dinner.
While they vaguely discuss, in between long silences, why they have come to
Capri, the camera frames them in deep closeups face on or as they turn to talk
to one another in side-face, intercutting these images so quickly that the two
seem to be almost literally pushing themselves into one another’s cheeks and
lips. These carefully constructed, discomfortingly tight shots suggest that
their intercourse is far more than simple talk, which in any case tells us
absolutely nothing about them, while the other meaning of the word explains
everything.
Into this man-on-man series of frames comes our new Eve, joining them at
their table and so interrupting their “conversation” that Mele almost
immediately is ready to leave.
Prévost, however, clever temptress that she
is, sensing the tension and jealousy between them, and knowing that Orsini has
abandoned the boy in order to attend to her, turns her focus entirely upon the
boy, enticing him—on the basis of Orisini’s insistence that Mele had attempted
to drown him the previous evening—to take her along on a murderous adventure.
The tensions between the trio remind us significantly of Truffaut’s Jules
et Jim (yet another early 60s queer-related film expressing the alienation
of its characters), but also suggests what someone other than Blake Edwards
might have been able to accomplish if he had remained truer to Truman Capote’s
original in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), particularly in the scene
where Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak (in the original closer to a straight
stand-in for the gay Capote) rob a dimestore. In Griffi’s far more
sophisticated version, the two approach a lone musician, Prévost pretending to
be a one-eyed assassin as they pretend to slit the man’s throat and run off
with his instrument like two bad children out of Jean Vigo’s Zero for
Conduct. And the scene that follows, where they frolic near a deserted
swimming pool where Prévost’s character shoots a round of pretended bullets
into the willing and waiting Mele, cannot help but remind one of another trio’s
encounter with an abandoned swimming pool in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a
Cause.
For at least one night, she keeps Mele entertained, while she continues
by day to lure the man who she recognizes is Mele’s would-be lover, Orsini. But
with regard to women, we realize, Orsini is not at all the frenzied man
attempting to sweep into love, but an uncertain stalker, a voyeur who follows
Prévost’s wanderings through the rain-swept streets of the island town. Aware
that he is trailing her, she orchestrates her movements with a handsome elderly
man—to whom he later discover she is attempting to sell her summer home—almost
in slow motion, creating a ballet out of stops and starts and the opening and
closing of umbrellas. If Orsini was impetuously compelled by the whereabouts of
the young boy previously, he is now tentatively fascinated by her balletic
movements, but almost fearful of joining her in a pas de deux. When he
does again approach her, this time at a distance in a bar as opposed to his
streetside rough-housing with his young male companion, he is met with her
highly emasculating laughter and even outright derision as she tells him to go
away and never again try to contact her.
Meanwhile, for Mele his role as sexual mentor has been twisted into a
version of longing desire which he realizes, given his companion’s sexual
confusion, can never be allayed. A visit to his hotel leads to the clerk’s
pretense that Orsini is not in, when in fact he has just heard him speak with
him. While Orsini chases after Prévost, Graffi gives
Mele an opportunity to perform almost a strip-tease as he bathes his
more-than-half nude body in the downpour upon his hotel rooftop. It is almost
as if the director were showing us the glory of the sexual partner that Orsini
has abandoned. If Orsini refuses to pay attention to the stunning youth,
Graffi’s camera will make love to him in front of us. If only Bob Mizer’s
jock-strap posing beefcakes of the same period could been half to lovely as
Mele appears before this director’s camera, the US might have questioned the sexuality of half the male population.
This is definitely male pin-up territory. Alas, I could find no pictures of
that particular scene and am left only with a photo of the boy combing his hair
after his affair with Guarnieri’s camera lens.
Even though Prévost again invites the boy over to her now
half-inhabitable villa to create a Basquiat like drawing on its pristine white
walls, Mele knows that he can never quite regain the attention of Orsini, and
his sadness and even madness is represented by his need now also to sulk
through the Caprian streets and follow the couple’s speechless outing in a
motorboat. We even fear that the young man might harm himself, so that when he
finally meets up with Orsini again one evening on the street, we are almost
relieved to see his violent hands-on approach to the man who metaphorically had
become his lover.
Here Orsini’s sexual denial is shown in full force, as he no longer toys
with bodily contact, but almost beats the boy so badly that Mele begs him not
to hurt him, blurting out a message about his knowing
that what is being told him is not the truth. Some commentators have
interrupted the sudden outburst as suggesting that perhaps Mele has escaped
from a Naples mental institution and that his violent swings of behavior
suggests that he is mad. Any gay man, however, knows that madness has long been
a way that the heterosexual society dismisses homosexual desires.
And
even Orsini knows that his hostile reaction to the boy’s attempt to again make
contact has gone too far. He drags the boy to Prévost’s
house, bandaging his forehead and issuing a series of commands for the kid to
sit up, walk, turn, put on his sweater etc. to prove that the boy is now well enough
to be left on his own. But even then, instead of sending Mele off, he forces
him to make a call home—wherever that might be—and even then asks if he should
accompany the boy back to his hotel. When Mele refuses, and attempts to leave,
Orsini runs after him delivering up a bottle of whisky and suggesting that
since tomorrow will be sunny he will join him on a boat ride.
It
is clear that despite his attempts to return to sexual normalcy, the Orsini
figure cannot quite give up his attraction to the youth.
As
he turns back to the Prévost figure, she suggests, having finally reeled him in,
that for the first time in a long while she does not wish to go to bed alone.
We have already established her rather banal reasons for her visit to Capri and
her feelings of dissociation. Having lived three blissful years with her
husband, he has left her; and she has now come to Capri simply to sell their
villa.
Orsini and her final sexual encounter—the only naturalistic presentation
of sex in this work—consists mostly of sheet-covered thrusts, as first one of
them sits up to be pulled back down, and then other parrots the act. Obviously,
it is not a joyful experience for either of them, and when morning arrives, we
see Orsini lying alone in bed half-uncovered while Prévost
sits in a nearby chair, pretending to sleep as she, now the voyeur, watches her
failed lover quietly dress himself and sneak off. As he is about to leave, he
discovers that the phone on which he forced Mele to call home was disconnected.
The call the boy made was simply a lie to placate him.
When he returns to the hotel, he requests that a telephone call to be
made to Rome, his own home evidently, at 11:00. Meanwhile, the clerk hands him
the unopened bottle of whiskey he has given Mele the previous night, which the
boy has obviously returned as an expression of his angry regret.
As
if suddenly realizing the error of his presumptions, not only about the boy but
possibly about himself, he rushes out to retrieve Mele from the departing ferry
for Naples. Even with the disposal of a taxi, he arrives too late, observing
the boat sailing off. As he turns back toward the hotel, he also witnesses
Prévost also leaving Capri on what appears to be her personal hydroplane. He
now is truly alone on Capri. Either he must return to an empty relationship in
Rome or haunt the streets where he has finally discovered and lost his true
self and love.
Graffi’s film is an incredible contribution to cinema history in general
as well as an amazingly prescient vision of what LGBTQ cinema could become. It
is so sad, accordingly, that although I found this film, with English
subtitles, on YouTube, it remains for most viewers a basically lost work of
art. I could not find a copy of Graffi’s later film, Metti, Una Sera a Cena
(1971), a work the Cinema Sojourns commentator describes as “more
self-consciously arty and erotic than Il Mare,” but which also deals
with gay or bisexual characters. I will, however, continue to keep trying in my
attempts to see this work as well.
Los Angeles, March 9, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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