•
Rating:
If you happen to meet someone who argues that "things were better when they were worse," don't hesitate to take them to see (lest we forget) Amelio's latest film titled "The Lord of the Ants," presented at the latest Venice Film Festival and recently released in cinemas. In the vein of committed civil cinema, which in Italy has had great authors like Rosi, Petri, Lizzani, Bellocchio (just to name a few), Amelio's latest work takes us back to what was, in the 1960s, the distressing case of Aldo Braibanti, an unorthodox Marxist intellectual and distinguished myrmecologist, who was tried in 1968 for allegedly manipulating a young student (who was already of age at the time) and was sentenced to nine years in prison, although he only served two.
As the film shows, Braibanti (effectively portrayed by Luigi Lo Cascio) managed a cultural club in those years open to new artistic modes in the province of Piacenza—a place not exactly known for its open-mindedness. The bigoted and reactionary parents of a young man attending the said club not only forcibly took their son home (later committed to a mental institution), but also filed a complaint against Braibanti. The accusation was outrageous, as it was based on Article 603 of the infamous Rocco Code (a legal corpus of ultra-fascist laws) promulgated during the Fascist regime. Here, the crime of plagiarism was contemplated, where one person could mentally subjugate and thus lead astray another, and the sentence could be up to 14 years. But beyond this rather questionable legal context, there was also a love between Braibanti and the young man involved in the affair that could not help but disturb certain reactionary and regressive public opinion of those times. As seen during the trial, the prosecutor publicly derides Professor Braibanti for his "demonic perversion," accustomed to sexually associating with men of different kinds, even men of color (for whom the ignominious phrase "Negroes are a race one can highly recommend..." is uttered), thus deserving of an exemplary punishment. What partly saves Braibanti is that he had been a partisan in the liberation war between 1943 and 1945, eventually serving only two years in prison.
The subject of the film is particularly close to Amelio's heart (he attended the open court hearings as a young man), but that doesn't mean the film is entirely effective in some parts (and personally, I do not give it top marks). It's fine to invent character names for those involved in the affair (excluding Braibanti's), but I'm somewhat puzzled by the purely fictional figure of the journalist from L'Unità (the then Italian Communist Party newspaper), well played by Elio Germano. He may be considered a voice of wise progressive conscience, but why does he have to go through the entire film with a hat firmly on his head? It's not clear.
Just as the director doesn't mention (and this is the major limitation) the outrage the entire case provoked among many intellectuals of the time (Eco, Moravia, Pasolini, Morante, etc.) and members of the radical party (Marco Pannella in particular). Certainly, the disinterest towards the Braibanti case by much of the historical left (PCI and its surroundings), still deaf to the importance of civil rights struggles, also emerges (by the late '60s, the youthful protest was being felt in Italy as well). As a secondary character in the film states at one point, "it's more important to protest against the war in Vietnam." And then, as many thought at the time, "there are two options for homosexuals: either cure themselves or kill themselves" (exact quote).
That's how things were back then and feeling nostalgic for those times is simply absurd. However, what I still notice today is a persistent reluctance from parts of the Italian public to consider the existence of love that isn't strictly heterosexual (just think of the vicissitudes of the Zan bill). And I'm not overly surprised because I still remember in 1978, ten years after Braibanti's trial, a television journalistic report on the topic correctly referred to it as a judicial case built on the crime of plagiarism (later abolished). It was all well laid out, but unfortunately, there was no mention of the homosexual relationship between the professor and the young disciple. Demonstrating that the topic of homosexuality here in Italy was simply unspeakable (and not only during the Fascist regime and the backward Rocco Code).
Loading comments slowly
