I Love Italian Everything

Really no need to fasten your seat belts for this old school Italian melodrama. 

Ferzan Ozpetek has done as much as anyone making homosexuality more mainstream in Italy; his gay themed and gay friendly films are beloved in Italy and ever since The Turkish Bath in 1997 he’s been helping to make it OK for Italians to come out of the closet. If his target audience is older Italians then it might make sense, his hesitance to abandon a tired movie formula that, clearly, younger Italians are rejecting.

It’s obvious that he can. Films like La Finestre di Fronte (Facing Windows) show what he can do with strong central characters and a clear story line. But his newest, Allaciate Le Cinture (Fasten Your Seatbelts) is pretty much everything I dislike about pre-2000 Italian movies.

Watching Allaciate Le Cinture I kept asking myself:

1)  What is Ozpetek trying to tell us? Not every movie has to have a message that is spelled out for me; in fact, I’m still trying to figure out what Sorrentino wants us to see in La Grande Bellezza. But in La Grande Bellezza, there is an abundance of, in fact an almost overload of visual and verbal stimuli. It’s about something, and maybe it’s not even about the same thing to me as it is to you, but it’s about something important.

In Allaciate Le Cinture, it’s about love. I guess. But his blatant tear-jerking is, frankly, annoying, and at this point I don’t think he’s even capable of manipulating my emotions. How bad do I feel rolling my eyes at cancer patients and impossible love? Pretty bad, but that’s on Ozpetek. He makes me feel like I do when Sarah McLaughlin does those ASPCA commercials. I might send money, but I don’t feel good about it.

2)  What are all these characters doing in the movie? Elena, the waitress (Kasia Smutniak) and Antonio, the auto mechanic (Francesco Arca) need some peripheral characters in their (inexplicable) love story, but I would have limited it to the gay best friend (Filippo Scicchitano) and the lasciviouss second best friend (Carolina Crescentini), and couple of cancer patients. Ozpetek loves to fill the screen with superfluous characters like wisecracking relatives who take away from the more important story instead giving it more substance.

3) And finally, why am I watching this movie? Maybe it’s because I’m not Italian, but I felt no investment in Elena and Antonio’s lives, and in what (I’m guessing) was supposed to have been life affirming moments, I felt discouraged, or nothing at all. I had to fight my urge to fast-forward though the middle.

And I wouldn’t have been this hard on Ozpetek had it not been for “the list” that it doesn’t belong on. Allaciate Le Cinture’s ended up as one of the 7 films being considered for submission to the Oscars, and though it woudn’t be the worst movie on the list (that would be Carlo Verdone’s Sotto Una Buona Stella) it still doesn’t belong there. With all the exciting new filmmakers in Italy today, and all the great new directions Italian cinema is going in, why give them “old school”? Old school didn’t even really work when it was new.