GIUSEPPE FIORELLO: FIREWORKS/STRANIZZA D'AMURI (2023 - OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA)
GABRIELE PIZZURRO AND SAMUELE SEGRETO IN FIREWORKS/STRANIZZA D'AMURI A gay love story, an infamous hate crime, a lasting political impact Italian TV star Giuseppe ("Beppe") Fiorello has staged an impressive directorial debut with
Fireworks/Stranizza d'amuri, a gay coming-of-age romance based on real events. It takes place in an ultra-conservative Sicily of the 1980's and ends with the hate crime that gave birth to Arcigay, Italy’s first and largest LGBTQ rights group. Simply opened in Italy March 23, 2023, with no festival showings, it has received no outside reviews, but apparent acclaim in Italy. An Italian review in
Quinlan by Massimiliano Schiavoni points out where the film is accurate and where it isn't - a place to start. A
Variety preview lays out details of the film's creation.
Fireworks arouses strong mixed feelings. The coming of age love story is sweet and touching; the general homophobia and resulting atrocity trigger feelings of horror and repulsion. Is one touched, disturbed, uplifted, angered, galvanized? It all may seem too much to deal with at once: the innocent purity of young love, the vile machismo overflowing into hate-crime murder. And to heighten the mood even further the film moves the events from 1980, when they occurred, to the summer of 1982, when Italy was exulting over its world Cup soccer win - and also includes some spectacular up-close-and-noisy fireworks sequences.
Schiavoni says Italy has forgotten this event because it wrongly thinks it has moved on and thus it was essential to retell the story as this film does: Italy is an externally beautiful country, he writes, but has't achieved a matching beauty on the inside.
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Fiorello recalls the tragic affair of the young homosexual couple Giorgio Giammona and Antonio Galatola, later remembered as Giorgio and Toni, who were shot dead in Giarre in 1980, according to the grim pattern of a murder with a clearly homophobic matrix. Having discarded the initial hypothesis of a murder/suicide triggered by the desperation of the two boys, the crime went unpunished, since the only serious suspect (and horror was added to horror) was Toni's nephew, barely 13 years old, who was not prosecutable for his age and who in any case recanted his version of events several times.
There are other complications, but the cloudy events, the fake suicide and lack of prosecution for any crime protected by traditional Sicilian
omertà, are clarified in the strong reaction: in Palermo within a month the first Arcigay homosexual activist group was formed, and this was to be the foremost gay activist organization in he country. Also a lesbian group reportedly was formed.
"The crime in Giarre" - shooting the two boys in the head while hand in hand - led to the novel
Stranizza by Valerio la Martire, to which this film owes a debt. But the actual Sicilian dialect title "Stranizza d'amuri" (Miracle of Love) refers to a famous song by Franco Battiato, a Giarre local, but composed in 1979 and referring to WWII but adolescent love. It's a very famous song, and Battiato's only one in his native Sicilian dialect. The reference indicates Fiorello's desire to make his film a universal portrait of adolescence and adolescent love that "penetrates the bones" of its youthful first-timers.
Fiorello paints with a very broad brush in this film. Many adult characters are more seen than developed. It uses intense closeups, the swarthy, bearded faces of the adult men, the smooth, fresh faces of the two boys who are at the center of the story - so very, very different from François Ozon's recent, also tragic, but not quite serious,
Summer of 85, which comes to mind because both teen gay romances feature romantic motorbike scenes.
Samuele Segreto is Gianni, the older, 17-year-old boy, already called mockingly "Giannuccia" and marked as a "faggot" for past behavior which may have caused him to spend time in a reformatory. He has a mean stepfather (and is probably illegitimate) and a frightened mother and his status in the tiny town is uneasy. Segreto is short, dark, and pretty with a bright and ready smile. He has some of the looks of the young Belmondo.
But smile or not, Gianni's circumstances are uneasy, so when by chance while delivering a motorbike he literally runs into Nino (Gabriele Pizzurro), Nino's unscathed reputation and relatively serene home life becomes a bridge to escape for Gianni - for a time - as well as to love. Nino assists his father, whose livelihood comes from staging fireworks displays for local fairs - an opportunity for the film to provide us with gorgeous and noisy screen-filling displays, which, if you give yourself to the style, seem not intrusive but integral: they express this world's explosive emotionality, as the rabbit-shooting scenes featuring Nino's semi-comic little bro Totò (Simone Raffaele Cordiano), express its inherent violence. Pizzurro is tall and thin with light skin and big fluffy hair. Nino loves to go off and strip down to his underpants and swim in the local river. Eventually he gets Gianni to join him.
Fiorello cunningly manipulates the World Cup not only to create climactic tension but to show Gianni and Nino's social exclusion because of their sexuality: when everybody is celebrating Italy's victory, at the ultimate moment of national brotherhood, they aren't watching but instead use the attraction of everyone's attention to go off by themselves once more. They have been forced to separate when too often they have been seen kissing. And while there is nothing like the spit-lubed butt-fucking of
Brokeback Mountain, it's made pretty clear that the kissing has led to making love.
I have to admit after seeing the film, and very close to the screen at the Walter Reade Theater where the visual and auditory impact was tremendous - that, though the film is a bit overlong and moves too slowly in its early reels - somehow Fiorello manages to make us feel above all else the pure adolescent feeling of the boys and the beauty of their love, despite the grim finale. It's an impactful film and one that ought to be seen outside local territories and specialized Italian cinema festivals. One wonders why it had no festival screenings to launch it for a broader audience - whether it was submitted only to Italian festivals, and rejected out of lingering unease.
Fireworks/Stranizza d'amuri, 172 mins., released theatrically in Italy with no festival exposure March 23, 2023. Screened for this review on opening day, June 1, 2023, as part of the June 1-8, 2023 Film at Lincoln Center-Cinecittà series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
Thursday, June 1 at 3:30pm (Q&A with Giuseppe Fiorello, Gabriele Pizurro, Samuele Segreto)
Tuesday, June 6 at 6:00pm
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