the perverted innocent
by Douglas Messerli
Mauro Bolognini, Enzo Curreli, Pasquale Festa
Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Luciano Martino, and Pier Paolo Pasolini
(screenplay), Mauro Bolognini (director) Giovani mariti (Young
Husbands) / 1958
Mauro Bolognini is one
of the least known in the English-speaking world of the great Italian directors
of the mid-20th century. Some of his most important works were fairly early in
his career when we worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini as one of his regular
co-authors. Indeed several of his films have similar themes to Pasolini’s Accatone
(1961), while recognizing his own and Pasolini’s debt to Federico Fellini’s
I Vitelloni (1953) and even Marcel Carné Les Tricheurs (The
Cheaters) (1958) and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco
and His Brothers) (1960), all of which actually depict homosexual characters.
At least three of Bolognini and Pasolini’s
collaborations have some significance to the LGBTQ community, particularly
Bolognini’s 1959 film La Note brava (The Big Night). That film,
in particular, actually represents what his other films such as La Giornata
balorda (From a Roman Balcony) (1960) and the earlier Giovani
mariti (Young Husbands) (1958) only hint at, that without female
companionship these heterosexual males were perfectly content to enjoy sex with
one another.
I have not included a review of From a
Roman Balcony in these volumes simply because the central character’s
activities are played out in a vacuum most of the time, without the intense
male companionship of the other works, and accordingly his heterosexuality
becomes the dominant theme, despite subtexts which locate his activities in a
world similar to those of the all-male bonding groups of The Big Night
and Young Husbands.
The five “Lions,” as they describe their
pack, are also heterosexual males, and indeed the central fiction of the film
focuses on their search for and discovery of suitable wives. Moreover, these
provincial city boys—some of the scenes were filmed in Lucca, Tuscany—are much
better off financially than the male groups of Fellini’s early work, Visconti’s
poor village brothers, the petty criminals of The Big Night, or the
aimless drifters of Pasolini’s own directorial debut. And they can apparently
afford the occasional prostitutes of which they take advantage. These boys play
tennis and are all members of a sports club which provides them with after Mass:
Sunday drinks at the bar, swims in the club’s pool, or sneaking kisses with
girls in the club’s gardens. Although we rarely see their parents or their home
life, we believe, just as we find it hard to imagine in The Big Night,
that both exist. Some of these boys read poetry, translate works from Latin,
and have skills far beyond the day laborers we witness in Accatone or The
Big Night.
Yet that makes these five friends seem all
the more like Peter Pan’s lost boys, perhaps with the high spirited and
energetic Franco as their leader. Certainly, he is the first to spur them on
from adventure to adventure—first to the pond where they all strip to their
underwear and jump in, one of their group losing his underpants in an obvious
prank; to join up with the passing band of boy musicians (much like the way the
central gang join up with others in The Big Night before their grand
male orgy); and to speed off to Dente’s, where they get the elderly chef out of
bed to serve up omelets—and later beautifully dances the Merengue on the other
side of the canal from where his friends walk.
If these closely bonded male friends seem
to talk incessantly about women, it is mainly simply a topic familiar to young
heterosexuals, but is simultaneously meaningless: they place their love for one
another beyond everything else. And, however, they perceive themselves, the
lions live in a homoerotic pack where women are simply insubstantial desires
which they assure themselves they can abandon on a moment’s notice; when one of
them gets seemingly too attached, the others step in to attempt to break it up,
the process we later observe when the kind-hearted Marcello falls in love with
Lucia (Antonella Lualdi).
The narrator of their history is Antonio
(Franco Interlenghi), also the group poet. And the first action that we observe
of the film begins with a handsome young man standing against a dark wall on a
backstreet during the opening credits. He appears to be a kind of hustler,
perhaps a male prostitute waiting for a client. A passing woman even attempts
to pick him up, as his proving our theory, but at that very moment the other
four members of the “Lions” show up, shooing away the woman and teasing the boy
against the wall, who turns out to be Antonio’s brother Guilio (Raf Mattioli),
who they describe as “the innocent.” However, we realize that indeed he has
been waiting for a pick-up—his four other male friends.
Antonio quickly establishes the major
characteristics of the others. Franco (Ennio Girolami) is the “crazy one,” “merriest
and happiest of them all”; the handsome Ettore (Antonio Cifariello) is “the
woman’s idol; and perhaps the most decent and nicest of the group, a boy
desperate to leave his provincial town, Marcello (Gérard Blain) is
characterized as “last in races, first in love,” the kind of boy every woman is
seeking. Antonio doesn’t immediately reveal himself, hiding it until the very
last scene.
The swimming scene, one of the first
major events of the film, clearly establishes the homo-eroticism that is the
glue to their relationship. They can hardly wait to strip down and jump into
the cold water where the frisk together in utter abandonment, in a kind sexual
idyll, broken only when the always
impetuous Franco suddenly appears back on shore. But even there he continues to
entertain them, as they slowly dress, exposing his nakedness to the group as he
climbs high into the nearby tree, establishing their animalistic passion.
He quickly backs that up, as I have
already suggested, by his joining up with a group of boy musicians, and leads
them all on to their ritual midnight feast. But mostly what they are seeking is
attention, not particularly of the sleeping townspeople, annoyed with their
late night antics, but of one another, each by each establishing their own howl
and adjusting to the sound to the others. They are still boys playing at the
jungle adventures of their own fairy tales. Their goal is to remain in stasis,
never becoming too infatuated with the other sex to truly endanger their
companionship, a situation that even in these early scenes we know, as do they,
cannot be maintained given their levels of testosterone, unless they do
actually turn to one another for sex. As determined as they are to remain
together forever, they realize that it, like all their other actions, is a mere
bluff.
From left to right:
Antonio, Franco, Ettore, Marcello, and Guilio
And before they can even comprehend what’s
happening, their leader suddenly marries a local beauty, Donatella (Rosy Mazzacurati). It was Peter Pan after all
that brought a girl into the lost boys’ world and fell in love with her
himself. But even their wedding serves still for the others as mere
entertainment, and they can’t wait until Franco gets back to share his sexual
experiences with them.
When they discover, a few weeks later that
he has been back in town for several days without contacting them, they appear
confused, the void having already had an effect. It appears that the noted
lover of the group, Ettore is growing too close to another of the town’s
beauties, Laura (Isabelle Corey). But in this case none of the
remaining Lions needs to intercede, as her own immaturity succeeds he keeping
him away, she not only playing hard to get, but slapping him when he attempts
to kiss her in the bushes at the club.
The visiting Mara Rossi Bandelli (Sylva
Koscina),
the wealthy daughter of
a city mayor who has a car that all the Lions eye with envy, happens to be at
the club taking in the sunshine, and Ettore determines to attempt to seduce
her, showing off his body as he dives in for a swim. They soon develop a relationship
in which she is far more in control than he, but her distance further intrigues
him. And certainly she has few of the young girl antics of Laura.
Meanwhile, the Lions have attempted to
visit Franco, only to be turned away at his door, he explaining that Donatella
is offended by their ruffian behavior. Something indeed has changed, and
they grow even angrier about their former “leader” when a job that has been
promised to Marcello has, through the intervention of Donatella’s father, been
given to Franco. The boys gather once more to confront Franco, only to have him
explain that Donatella is pregnant and he needed a job, and that he himself had
not been involved in the decision. Surely they cannot resent him for attempting
to be a good husband and soon-to-be father? They turn away, realizing they have
lost their “hero” forever, all of them vowing to cut off all women and sex.
The new creed, however, doesn’t last
long before Marcello meets a lovely newcomer to the city, a truly sweet,
unspoiled, and intelligent girl, Lucia (Antonella Lualdi) whose father runs a
local mental institution. It is here that the Lions show how they attempt to
break up relationships in order to keep their members free for their own
personal enjoyment. Antonio describes, given Ettore’s distractions and Giulio’s
interest in literature and the movies, that he was the only one able to take on
the task. Meeting up with the two on a date, Antonio, Ettore, and Franco take
over conversing with Lucia, while assigning Franco’s now young son to Marcello,
forced to drag behind them as the boy asks for other diversions and expresses a
need to urinate which Marcello won’t permit.
Antonio later even arranges to have a
date with the girl, who mysteriously accepts—primarily, we soon discover, just
to test herself with the other local boys. She discovers through Antonio’s
insistence that basically all women are alike, but that she is different, a
kind of empty affection that doesn’t at all interest her, as she suddenly
dismisses him, making it quite clear that she is truly in love with Marcello.
The breakup of Marcello’s love affair is a horrible failure. Even the fact that
he thought he had shared poetry with her is an illusion; she knows poetry only
because her father loves it.
Guilio, we later discover, is helping
Laura translate Sallast, and it is apparent he has a crush on her; but all she
can do is make phone calls to her friend Ornella (Anna Maria Guarnieri) to talk
about Ettore, desperate to know where he goes and what he does since that
fateful slap that seems to have separated them. She attempts to share
expressions of love she is reading in a fiction by Françoise Sagan, but Guilio
appears to find the expressions of female love as “statements she should have
kept to herself,” Laura suggesting that “Not everyone is like you,” a hint
perhaps that he may in fact be gay, possibly confirmed when he later, in
attempting to reveal his love for her as his ideal of a woman, that he has
never had sex with a female. But, in fact, his love for her genuine, simply
lost in her infatuation with Ettore, which ends finally when the girl’s idol
decides to marry
Mara, primarily for her
money—a decision that seems to shock all of the Lions and their girlfriends.
At the wedding, where everyone expected
Laura to make a huge public display, she is suddenly freed when the couple give
their vows, rediscovering the love of Guilio of which she has previously seemed
oblivious.
Time does not simply pass in this tale,
but rushes forward, as we suddenly find ourselves at the christening of Mara
and Ettore’s son, named after all of the Lions. At the club after the event,
the now disbanded pack determine if only for one night to restore their youth,
their male camaraderie, and the unspoken love behind it with one final fling on
the town. This time crowded into Mara’s convertible with Ettore at the wheel,
they race through the city much as in the early scenes when they ran on foot,
loudly proclaiming their territory. Once more they strip off their pants and
jump into the pond to splash around. Franco climbs the tree a pretend a
Tarzan-like ape while showing off his hairy blonde physique to the gang of
undressed boys below. Yet he fears that his son may be ill and is worried
because he is not home to hear to him cry and come to his aid.
Marcello secretly confesses to Guilio
that the next morning he will be leaving for a job in Milan, traveling away
from Lucia so that he might make enough money and return one day to marry her.
Guilio himself is sick from being separated for Laura, whom he now plans to
marry, and eventually leaves the group, as he has many times in the past,
early. Their minds are clearly elsewhere.
The Lions rush to Dente’s for breakfast
but our told by his young daughter that he has died. After a few more loud
spins through the town leaves them empty, they are left with only one final
remnant of the past. They pick up three prostitutes and take them to the sports
club. There the women drink, dance, and kiss the now disinterested boys, while
in the background Harry Belafonte’s hit Banana Boat Song plays on the
jukebox, telling us what the boys clearly feel:
Day-o, day-o
Daylight come and me
wan' go home
Day, me say day, me say
day, me say day
Me say day, me say day-o
Daylight come and me
wan' go home
Franco, now truly worried about his son,
is the first to pull away; and when Antonio badmouths Lucia, Marcello slugs and
also leaves. As a woman arrives to throw everyone out of the illegally opened
club house, the girls get into a violent cat-fight, and Ettore finally slinks
off, driving the car back to the money which he has married.
Only Antonio, our storyteller, remains
alone, drunk, and obviously with no one to go home to. He alone has remained
true to their creed of no serious commitments to the opposite sex. It doesn’t
really matter whether or not Antonio is actually gay or secretly closeted,
having lived for those precious moments with his close friends. In this
provincial city, Antonio is virtually without anyone with whom to have sex.
Even more than his brother Guilio and despite any of his numerous dealings with
the opposite sex, he is still the real virgin, a man who has not found joy and
love in the sexual act. Oddly, he is a kind of perverted innocent, a deluded
boy who has totally been convinced that true love existed in the male bonds he
had forged with the other boys instead of the arms of a woman.
As if we needed evidence of the true
force of the adolescent Peter Pan myth in these men had believed, Bolognini and
his writers add a coda that lies outside of Antonio’s telling, where Marcello
and Lucia on a bus on his way to the train that will take him away to Milan,
discuss their worries about being separated, their love for one another, and,
strangely, the continual pull that Marcello feels for his love of his friends.
What he seems to regret even more than leaving Lucia is that he has not been able
to say goodbye to the other Lions, and that while they are sleeping he will
have disappeared into a new “other,” adult life. When he shouts out “Goodbye
Fatty,” the name of the whore they invoked whenever they ran through the town’s
main square, even Laura grows jealous of his ghosts, particularly Antonio and
his other friends. Despite being their last moments together, Marcello quotes
the lines from the poem Antonio’s quoted:
O,
love listen
to
your sweetheart’s tale
Pain a
man will suffer
when
friends abandon him
She assures him, as he previously has her,
that he will soon be back. But his last words suggest his anguish at having
lost their love more than the fear of losing hers: “Yes. But for now
everything’s over, and we haven’t said farewell,” the last words of the film.
Marcello is in tears less for the loss of the woman he loves than for the boys
he leaves behind.
Today, Bolognini’s quiet film about the
end of male camaraderie hardly seems like a very forceful statement about
male/male friendships let alone about homosexual love. Yet in 1958 for those
who knew how to read such films, Young Husbands was a strong statement,
and it appears that there was some homophobic reaction even to this story about
heterosexual marriages.
The film was shown at the Cannes Film
Festival, winning cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi the Silver Ribbon (Nastro
d’Argento) for the Best Cinematography. In 1977, Bolognini remembered in an
interview with French journalist Jean Gilli, however, the circumstances of the
day, recalling that he faced a certain hostility on the part of producers and
fellow directors for his partnership with Pasolini.
“Take the opening night
of Giovani Mariti as an example, at the end of which no applause was
heard and everyone avoided talking to me. Only Federico Fellini asked me ‘But
why do you do these things?’”
Gradually, Bolognini realized that what
bothered everyone was the dialogues written by Pasolini. It was then that he
decided to continue the partnership. And the very next year the two would make
a film about similar young male relationships in which homosexual activity
would be far more obvious.
Los Angeles, March 7,
2022
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (March 2022).
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