Pasquale Festa Campanile
Nessuno è perfetto

Hello everyone!

Since my return to the music field has been well-received, I think it's not a bad idea to end the week by reflecting, with and for you, on “lesser” Italian cinema, picking up more or less where we left off: that is, Renato Pozzetto and his cinema. I've loved Renato since I was young, and there are plenty of reasons to do so; I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's probably safe to say that you can appreciate or rediscover him too, depending on your age and experience.

I'm stretching a bit after years of not writing about cinema with this small unknown masterpiece, which forms an ideal diptych with the more celebrated and well-known “La patata bollente” (’79), always by Steno. If that film tackled, with extraordinary modernity - for its time, but not only - the theme of homosexual love, in my opinion surpassing even the caricature of “La Cage aux Folles”, with “Nessuno è perfetto” by the late Pasquale Festa Campanile (’81), we really reach the peak since it legitimizes nothing less than transsexualism and transgenderism. Read carefully: 1981, when at the time homosexuality was barely spoken of and transsexualism was often confused with cross-dressing.

First of all, the plot: Guerrino, widower of his beautiful wife, continues to live in the splendid family villa in Bergamo Alta, dividing his life between the abandoned wine industry, friends in the historic center, and daily small tasks. Among them, stands out the visit to the cemetery where his lost love is buried. In the villa, also lives Guerrino's lustful mother-in-law - a great Lina Volonghi – with whom he occasionally couples, just to (not) lose his touch. Already in this, I think one can understand that we are between Boccaccio, Gogol, and Piero Chiara. But there is more.

Our protagonist's life changes completely when, on a business trip to Milan, he meets the beautiful Chantal (a charming Ornella Muti), with whom he soon falls in love until they cohabit. This cohabitation, if on one hand, completely transforms Guerrino in spirit and body, in sensual daily life as well as in renewed business commitment, on the other creates not a few headaches, both towards the mother-in-law left sexually unsatisfied, and towards the friends in the town center, very jealous of the fortune that has befallen the protagonist. Complications arise in an utterly unpredictable way due to the accidental discovery that Chantal has a past as a paratrooper, a group not yet open to female soldiers at the time. So, it's one of two things until it's discovered that the beloved Chantal is/was… a man! I won't say more to not spoil the pleasure and surprise of seeing how it ends.

Instead, I'd prefer to dedicate some thoughts to the theme of the film and the reasons why, over the years, it is becoming a true classic: I don't want to open debates, especially with those who follow me “live” – greetings to all the friends at the bar, by the way! – but over the decades “Nessuno è perfetto” risks being preferable to “La patata bollente”, except for the acting performance of Ranieri and the radiant Fenech, who is always preferred over Muti.

While many directors challenge themselves with sexuality and its dark sides – let's think of Von Trier in the beautiful Nymphomaniac, but also the various Losey types, not to mention Ferreri among ours, and I'll skip Brass, evidently – it is not always said that an intellectual approach to the phenomenon is the best, since the risk is to make the narrative a bit too cerebral and, forgive the paradox, cold. At which, the only way out is the breakdown of the Venetian master.

Here, instead, the opposite miracle is achieved: it’s clear that there is no direct representation of sexuality, only suggested and seized in its beneficial effects, but everything revolves around the sexuality of the protagonist, afflicted with various phobias or paraphilias. The visit to the cemetery and the enduring love for the wife seem almost like a visit to Hades, reminiscent of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, that is, the risk of being stuck in an inert, petrified, sepulchral contemplation of the past; at the same time, the sexuality experienced with the mother-in-law does not hide, nor could it, a clear Oedipal reference, here diluted, but also complicated, by the fact that the object of the lived and practiced sexuality in a sort of domestic tranquility, is the mother of the deceased wife.

It indirectly evokes, even in the description of environments, the specter (it is worth saying) of necrophilia, here understood in a symbolic rather than physical sense as the contemplation of death as the only hope of reconnecting to a past that is not, is not anymore, will never be. It is no coincidence that the same sexuality is lived in such a way as to avoid and almost preclude the perpetuation of the species, given the sterility of the elderly mother-in-law.

The eruption of the character played by Muti appears, therefore, as the birth of Aphrodite from the Waters or a Botticelli’s Primavera full of sensuality promised maternities, that is, openness towards the future, trust in a future that can represent the summer of life, guarantee the perpetuation of the species, the same business continuity. A future escaped and repelled, buried with the dead wife, resurrected with the new partner.

If one stopped here, one would place oneself in the typical perspective of the love story as an opportunity for rebirth and growth. But it is known that Eros shakes the soul and body with paths not always usual. In our case, the arrow makes him fall in love with a her who finally reveals to be a him, placing the character played by our national Renatone at the center of the tragic choice between form and substance: I love her, I am attracted to her, but then I discover that she is not “her,” but someone else, and so who should I believe? Form understood as appearance, as eidos, or substance understood as that which does not change, beyond the phenotype?

Here is where the carnal love felt for Muti becomes a path for self-discovery, for a metamorphosis within the protagonist who faces a deuteragonist already metamorphosed, and, at the same time, as an initiatory path that leads from sensual love to spiritual one and beyond.

A brave film, and deeper than it seems, therefore. But, above all, a film that today, in 2015, no one would have the courage to make, in Italy. And almost no one to review. But nobody is perfect!

Perfectly Yours

Il_Paolo