Ferzan Ozpetek
Nuovo Olimpo

Ferzan Ozpetek's latest film, titled "Nuovo Olimpo" and available on the Netflix platform since last November 1st, takes us back to the days when movie theaters were genuine places of gathering and socialization. This might seem out of this world when compared to our current times, where cinemas are becoming fewer not only for economic reasons (this has also been debated here on Debaser).

The setting of the entire story represented by the film is, in my opinion, its strong suit, considering a plot that unfolds along paths already typical in Ozpetek's filmography. Essentially, the sudden flare-up of romantic passion between the two male characters is familiar to those who have seen past works of the director. Here, it's about the aspiring director Enea Monti (a character inspired by Ozpetek himself and played by a diligent Damiano Gavino) and the medical student Pietro (not particularly well portrayed by Andrea Di Luigi, whose facial expression is as immobile and akin to that of a boiled fish), caught in a mad passion against the backdrop of turbulent Rome at the end of the '70s.

But the intensity of their feelings, due to overwhelming circumstances, doesn’t hold, and the two will not be able to solidify their bond, swept away by unexpected events that lead them to undertake very different and distant existential and professional paths. And if over the decades they would come close to meeting again, it will only be in 2015 that fate will conspire to enable an unexpected reconnection, thanks to such fortuitous events that they won’t be spoiled here to preserve the element of surprise for those who want to watch the film.

The development of the film flows smoothly without many jolts and seems completely cold. Those "sliding doors" that punctuate the existence of the characters don’t ignite much engagement from the viewer, something that happened in other films by Ozpetek and even in a very similar film like Chazelle's "La La Land," with characters that evoked empathy for the sentimental vicissitudes represented.

If anything, I found more successful the description of the movie theater as a meeting place in those now distant years. And, having lived through that moment, I can confirm that cinema was also a place to share a significant cultural experience.

Unfortunately, however, for certain patrons, the darkness of the movie theater was the pretext for other activities as well. And it might have been tolerable to go there to make out with a soulmate in the last row (although it was better to maybe go to "camporella" in a car). Intolerable, rather, as hinted at in "Nuovo Olimpo," was the certain habit of male viewers getting so familiar as to rush into the bathrooms to satisfy certain well-known sexual urges. And unfortunately, it happened to me in a second-run cinema in Milan, right in those years, to be the object of unwanted attentions from a middle-aged man who came to sit next to me while I was intently watching "Fellini Satyricon." In less than a minute, the two-legged pig placed his foul hand on my thigh. I, to make it clear how I felt, delivered a sharp elbow jab to his lower parts which made him promptly leave the seat, moaning a subdued "Uhuhu" of pain.

But I say: who asked him for such familiarity? I had paid the ticket to watch an auteur film, not to engage in filth with a perfect stranger who perhaps, outside that context, posed as a respectable, moralistic bourgeois, practicing believer of the holy Roman church. He should have wallowed with his kind in the cinema’s restroom!

For me, there has never been anything to object about consensual sex, but nonetheless, outside the movie theater. And about the sanctity of the cinematic place, I never had doubts. In this, Ferzan Ozpetek's latest film at least has the merit of recreating an atmosphere and a custom today now almost forgotten.