desperate embraces
by Douglas Messerli
Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay, based on his
novel La ragazzi di vit), Mauro Bolognini (director) La notte brava (The
Big Night), aka Bad Girls Don’t Cry and Night Heat /
1959
Out of the Neo-Realist Italian films of the
post-war 1940s and 1950s, grew an amazingly powerful new Italian cinema in the
late 1950s and throughout the 1960s that dominated world cinema. These works by
Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Mauro Bolognini, and others—cutting through
the underlying neorealist grids of the romantic—asserted political and
satirical issues that undercut whatever spiritual and nationalist subtexts
remained in the earlier works.
With the economic redevelopment of the post Fascist-Italy and the
gradual crumbling of the pre-war wealthy and noble Italian families, along with
the immigration to the cities of a vast number of young rural males and their
families, a deep rift had grown between the old and new wealthy and those who
felt themselves as outsiders in their own society. The tensions between the
often handsome and well-dressed poor youths who now dominated Italian street
life and the sons and daughters of the decadent noble families who associated
with the younger nouveau riche grew so intense that it became a palpable
force that spilled out into the nightlife of Rome, Milan, and other major
cities.
At one end of the spectrum Fellini, Antonioni, and Griffi explored the
decadent and aimless worlds of the wealthy, while Pasolini and Bolognini
centered their works primarily on those seeking to find a way to survive day by
day in a world in which there were so few jobs available that they posed as
determined drifters; throughout his career Visconti shifted from one end of the
spectrum to the other. Together both of these groups of filmmakers expressed
the terrifying angst and meaningless of life in Italy throughout the 1960s and
the effects of Italian Fascism long into the next decade.
In
a world in which everyday survival meant fluidly moving between ephemeral
possibilities of finding money, food, and love Pasolini and Bolognini, in
particular, were fascinated by the transitoriness of both male and female
sexuality wherein the male macho and female heterosexual poses often slipped in
between pitched battles of those of the same sex and strong couplings of female
solidarity along with male-on-male sex. The street boys wrestling each other
all day sometimes fell into each other arms in exhaustion by night, while
females working basically as competitive whores both off and on the streets
cuddled up to one another in consolation in their off hours. Accordingly, these
works along with nearly all of Visconti’s films are of most interest to LGBTQ
audiences, although Fellini and Griffi often veered outside of their basically
sexually normative—if you can describe Fellini’s and Griffi’s depictions of
male and female couplings as representing anything close to
“normal”—representations of love.
Somewhere between Fellini’s celebrity-struck decadents in La Dolce
Vita (1960) and Pasolini’s rollicking and fighting homeboys in Accatone (1961)
stands Bolognini’s gangs of beautiful young street thieves in La notte brava (1959).
One might argue that this trinity of films represent almost all the ideas that
were later expressed in myriad ways in the Italian films of the 1960s.
La
notte brava shares more of the turf of the Pasolini work that is to be
expected given that the film’s script was written by that director based on his
novel La ragazzi di vit (1956); but
Bolognini, against Pasolini’s advice chose known actors to perform in major
roles instead of using unknowns as the screenwriter desired. Moreover, his
cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi’s languid gazes of the work’s almost
too-beautiful-to-be-believed male leads, despite Pasolini’s gay sexuality,
might surely have rubbed the younger director the wrong way given that it
removes them from the ordinariness of everyman status. Indeed, if the script
demands us not to like these petty criminals we instead grow to sympathize and
even empathize with their empty lives pushing the film in the direction, I
argue, of the French New Wave.
Oddly, given Pasolini’s narrative talents, one might easily recut most
of the seemingly pointless “actions” of the story to be shown in a different
chronological order, each “event” representing, as it does, just another small
attempt to get through another frustrating day.
Strangely, although none of the central characters engage in what might
normally be defined as work or a regular “job,” the prostitutes Anna (Elsa
Martinelli) and Supplizia (Antonella Lualdi) and the two petty thieves
Ruggeretto (Laurent Terzieff) and Scintillone (Jean-Claude Brialy) work harder
than almost any factory employee to make ends meet. And since all might be
described as “self-employed,” they have to do battle with one another as well
in order to survive. In short, it’s not easy life to scrounge up enough money
each day for dinner or an evening’s sexual pleasure.
The
film begins with a pitch-battle fight between Anna and Supplizia who seem to be
fighting over the territory of a man the other intruded upon the evening prior.
Soon the girls are “hired” by Ruggeretto and Scintillone, but not as one might
suspect for sexual gratification, but rather, as even the girls quickly figure
out, as decoys to cover their actions in case they meet up with the police.
Having stolen four police rifles they hope to sell them to a middleman,
Mosciarella (Mario Meniconi) but catch him at the very moment when he is in the
midst of a funeral for his mother. Despite their continued insistence, he
whispers between displays of sobs, “Tomorrow.”
Our two inept robbers, desperate for money, however, cannot wait. A
cousin of the grieving son Gino “Bellabella” (Franco
Interlenghi), having overheard their
pleas, agrees to skip the funeral and take them to another jobber if they share
a percent. But his connection has just been dispossessed and has no money to
pay for the loot.
Bored and tired of their “customers’” ineptness, the whores propose they
visit a friend of theirs in an isolated house just outside of the Rome city
limits, owned by a deaf mute, with another prostitute, Nicoletta sprawled out
nude in his bed. Only she, apparently, can communicate with him, making the
deal for yet another percent, and counting out the substantial amount money as
she deposits it into one of their hands.
On
their way back into Rome, the trio of males now determine to stop in a field
and a small grove of trees supposedly to enjoy a romantic interlude, which the
girls realize will end up in their being dumped. Yet oddly, each male taking
one of the females off into their separate space, do enjoy a moment of quiet
companionship simply talking to one another.
The boys finally make their run, but before they reach their home
destination they discover the women have taken the money stashed in the glove
compartment. By the time they return to their former Arcadia the prostitutes
have split.
Seeking the women out on the streets they run into another “gang” of
three equally pretty boys and, after the trio attempt to steal a camera from
their car, engage in a street fight only to join up in order to allude the
police who have been called to end their skirmish.
Throughout Bolognini’s work the camera keeps returning to derelict
wastelands in the midst of the vast apartment complexes of the urban landscape
(a contrast that is repeated in the films of Fellini, Pasolini, and Antonioni
as well), and it is now in just such a space that the six males, replacing the
former gender-mixed sextet, go to finish off their macho melee. But the tone
suddenly shifts here, as if finding themselves in some sort of remnant of
nature they are temporarily mollified and returned to a semblance of humanity.
They meet a couple of small boys attempting to lug a large wing of a small
plane down from a hill, hoping to take it to a junk collector to bring home a
small bit of change to their parents just so they might eat. Surely it reminds
them of their own youths, and one of the new members of the group decides to
help the ragazzi load their find on a small wagon, handing them some
bills for their efforts.
The
original trio of Ruggeretto, Scintillone,
and Bellabella decide they like the three new companions and they all agree to
adventure out into the night together, soon spotting a small wagon asking for
paid blood donations. Together, they correctly estimate, they’ll make enough to
eat or at least store up on alcohol.
Bolognini never shows us the immediate results of that blood-letting but
he can well imagine what it must have consisted of since the film’s longest
scenes are devoted to the camera panning over the beautiful open-shirted and
half nude bodies sprawled in various after-sex poses in a large room of a Roman
villa where one of the group obviously is employed, the wealthy tenants away
for a few days.
In
all the descriptions I read about La Notte Brava in English only one
mentions this essential scene of the film. But without comprehending it,
Bolognini’s film makes little sense. For here we have suddenly opened up a door
to discover Fellini hiding behind it, revealing a Rome behind the curtain of
Italian masculine bluff. Throughout this film, women are “used” not primarily
for their
sexual abilities, but as fronts, companions,
and images of what the good life looks like, as decoys to cover up the secret
joys of male camaraderie. There is no way to describe the scene the director’s
brilliant cinematographer lays out before our eyes for several long minutes: if
these men have obviously consumed a great deal of alcohol they are even more
sotted from mutual sex.
Critic Paul Travers expresses it quite straight-forwardly:
“Bolognini then
treats us to a grandiose exhibition of male bonding which culminates in the
film’s most notorious sequence, an all-male orgy in a swanky Roman villa, of
the kind no doubt de rigueur two thousand years previous. Bolognini spares us
the sordid details but from the homoerotic signals being fired in every
direction, it is obvious that heavy consumption of alcohol is not the only vice
to have been indulged in.”
Actually, the director doesn’t entirely spare us as “the sordid details”
as the camera slowly pans across the sated bodies, with Bellabella
sentimentally sobbing over the fact that he has missed his great-aunt’s funeral
while spending the evening amusing himself “like a bastard.”
One
rubs his chest and moves his hand across his crotch. Another calls up his
girlfriend to describe those laid out before him, attaching animal names to
each. Scintillone moves over to his friend and lays
down next to one rubbing his nipples and chest through his half open shirt,
putting his hand to his arm before beginning a sentence with the words that any
gay man might use in an attempt to describe his feelings to another male who he
is uncertain will want to hear of his love:
”I don’t know how to say it.... You may not
understand.”
What he is really about to say, however, is even more queer, given the
circumstance. Explaining that he has no money despite having even attempted to
work, he is asking for some money as if he were also a prostitute requesting
after the fact the pay the handsome lover had promised for sex. The friend
hands him over several bills as Scintillone again places his hand upon
his arm, the other continuing to rub his chest.
Ruggeretto meanwhile explores the villa, discovering in a back bedroom a
girl sleeping on a bed. Pulling back her cover, he discovers a stunning nude
who wakes up wondering if he is her brother, obviously one the boys that
Ruggeretto has just fucked. The two engage in sexual banter as she dresses,
apparently in her employer’s wardrobe since it quickly becomes obvious that she
works in the house as the maid.
Ruggeretto would obviously love to spend more time with her but their tête-à-tête
is interrupted by Bellabella who announces, he has just stolen the wallet
containing a large sum of money from their host. The three meet again after
racing away from the villa in a small square, where after promising to share
his ill-gotten purse, Baellabella and
Ruggeretto—who wants to return the money so that he might again meet up
with the lovely maid—engage in a slug out, with Ruggeretto finally winning.
When he turns back, however, to pick up the wallet he finds it missing,
Scintillone having stolen it and run off.
Scintillone tries to hook up with his ex-girlfriend Rossana (Rosanna
Schiaffino), using some of his new money to buy everyone drinks before he
discovers her with her new boyfriend Eliseo (Franco Balducci) at a dancing
joint. He dances with her, plotting to meet her at her home a short while
later.
When they finally meet up he takes her to an expensive club where only
the wealthy go, but as they attempt to enjoy their newfound wealth, the maître
d’restuarant arrives to tell him that all the tables are reserved. When Scintillone
refuses to leave, he is thrown out and the police called. He is arrested as
Rossana retrieves the stolen wallet, Ruggeretto coming upon the scene just in
time to steal back the stolen wallet and take Rossana, as he puts it, “to
life.”
They visit a couple of clubs and end up in an expensive restaurant about
to close for the evening. This time a bribe buys them a late-night dinner all
alone and the return of the band so they might dance. They joke about how they
might be treated if the servers knew how poor they were; and recognizing that
tomorrow they will need to struggle all over again just to eat, Rossana
proclaims “One night in a year is enough.”
Ruggeretto pays for the taxi back to her house, before asking the cab
driver to drop him off near his home, paying with almost the very last
remaining bill in the wallet.
He
sits on a nearby wall and drops the last scrap of money to the trash pile below
where, in the opening credits we might have spotted it if we had known what to
look for.
Bolognini’s film, indeed, demands that kind of attention to detail. For
in Ruggeretto and Scintillone’s world it is not what is said nor to whom it is
said that matters. A “girlfriend” or a “boyfriend”—in fact, any “friend”—or
“lover” are just words. In the end, loving involves anyone with whom in your
daily desperation you can grab a quick embrace before moving on. Living is
something you try to do day by day.
Los Angeles, April 24, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (April 2021).
