STEFANO ACCORSI AND ISABELLA FERRARI

Of love and death and togetherness and ping pong

The prolific gay Turkish-Italian filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek's recent Satun in Opposition/Saturno contro resembles his 2001 His Secret Life/Le Fate ignoranti. Again at the center of things is a multicultural group in Rome that forms a very gay-friendly nontraditional family that frequently eats and celebrates together and pulls together when trouble comes. Both times it's a sudden death in the group that gives rise to the extra need for solidarity. Not only that. Both movies have the same wise-cracking Turkish fag hag character played by Serra Yilmaz. There are jokes and tears. The mix works pretty well and Ozpetek continues to perfect his shtick. But it's beginning to look a bit familiar (Ozpetek's work has always looked slick and superficial to me). This time the initial relationship and back-stories are roughed in so fast it's hard to care--though care, and care a lot, is certainly what we're supposed to do.

Last time he worked for Ozpetek Stefano Accorsi was determinedly gay, which seemed novel and showed his mettle as an actor, since he was such a lusty (and indecisive) fellow in his popular early success, Gabriele Muccino's The Last Kiss (also 2001; Accorsi was a busy and versatile boy that year). In Le Fati ignoranti the death of Margherita Buy's husband touched off the action. This time Accorsi and Buy are a married couple called Antonio and Angelica, and they've got two young kids (though she's visibly a good deal older). At center stage is a successful children's book writer called Davide (Pierfrancesco Favino). Favino is also an alumnus of The Last Kiss: it was his wedding that drew Accorsi's character to the fatal meeting with the young blonde. But Davide's in a long-term relationship with the handsome young Lorenzo (Luca Argentero). Davide's the center of things group-wise, the cook, the social manager, the host; and the main proceedings get under way with a dinner gathering at which all the cast of characters is invited. Antonio's not there; he says he has a bank meeting. Well.....

A special guest is the bi- Paolo (Michelangelo Tommaso), another handsome young man, who's excited to meet Davide because he writes stories himself. Angelica by the way works at an anti-smoking center, which is ironic because Roberta (appealing relative newcomer Ambra Angiolini), who once had a thing going with Paolo, has a lot more things to give up besides smoking. She's a self-declared drug addict; she's an old friend and classmate of Lorenzo. Serra Yilma this time is called Neval, and she's an interpreter. Her boyfriend is Roberto (Filippo Timi), a cop, not much a part of the group or perhaps even of the relationship with Neval: he stammers when he talks to her, and is pretty much a cipher. Also present is the somewhat older remittance man Sergio (Ennio Fantastichini) Davide's ex.

All this may seem like an awful lot of detail and indeed, I wished I could have stopped the film and jotted down notes. But the relationships are essential preparation to make clear why, when Lorenzo keels over at the dinner table and is whisked away to a hospital, never to be seen again, it affects everybody deeply.

There is also the obligatory "storia," love affair, that comes out after the trauma of Lorenzo--not involving Davide and Lorenzo, but Angelica and Antonio. Antonio's having the "storia" with Laura (Isabella Ferrari), who runs an eye-filling florist shop (lots of big red flowers). When the kids overhear them fighting and know what's happening, it's cute--which is frivolous, but entertaining.

I think my favorite character is Sergio, who shows his relationship with an older tradition of homsexuality saying, when he's asked if he's "gay" (using that word in Italian), "no, sono froscio," "no, I'm a fag." The word "gay" is a lot newer to Italians than it is to Americans. This is a more telling wisecrack than Neval's cute answer when asked "are you foreign?"--"No, I'm Turkish." Or Roberta's various remarks about reincarnation and horoscopes and her drama-queen tendencies.

Ozpetek is good at keeping things light, through the sadness. The multi-cultural/non-traditional "family" fairly camps out in the hospital where Lorenzo is hidden away from us. New characters come to take his place, Lorenzo's father Vittorio (Luigi Diberti), who never accepted his son's gayness but touchingly changes course about that. Minnie (Lunetta Savino), Vittorio's second wife, and an understanding but occasionally severe nurse (Milena Vukotic), who looks the other way when the group lingers far beyond visiting hours.

All this is immensely smooth and accomplished in its way--save for the periodic exotic pop songs in Turkish, Spanish, French etc, which are quite pointless and silly-- but the events are all somehow unconvincing, chiefly because they all arrive too easily and too fast.--and now that one's seen some of Ozpetek's work, too predictably. The complete disappearance of Lorenzo is just one of the more obviously facile devices. When Lorenzo inevitably and, according to the nurse, fortunately, does not last--he had a cerebral blood clot that would have made him helpless and probably vegetative--Davide has his declarations of inconsolability and everybody does a quiet aria of sadness in the hospital hallway.

Meanwhile Antonio moves out of the house and leaves Angelica with the children--but that issue is never quite resolved. The trajectory of the plot leads to the point, at Davide's fab country house in the hills, when he moves from despair to smiles after Antonio, who has his own issues to wrestle with, lures him into an early morning game of ping pong. And that's it. If you can smile and play ping pong, you're going to make it.

Shown at the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center, June 2008.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.