The achingly romantic new gay film by Ferzan Ozpetek (Steam: The Turkish Bath, His Secret Life, Facing Windows) is now available on Netflix and it’s a stunner.
The title comes from the marquee of a movie theater in Rome in the 1970s, which, besides showing Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini films, caters to a gay cruising crowd prone to hooking up later in the theater bathroom. Enea (handsome Damiano Gavino), a college film student, meets and falls for a medical student Pietro (Andrea Di Luigi) there at the theater. Pietro is averse to a dalliance in the toilet, so Enea takes him to a relatives’ apartment with a gorgeous terrace that overlooks the city. They spend the afternoon making passionate love and plan to meet later, but are tricked by fate to not see each other for years and years.
The film spans decades of the two men’s lives. Enea becomes a successful, openly gay film director who slips in aspects of his fleeting affair with Pietro into several of his movies. Pietro has become a well-respected doctor, now married to Giulia (Greta Scarano), but both are still haunted by their doomed, short, but passionate, affair.
Luisa Ranieri is a scene stealer as Titti, the seductive, eccentric, manager of the movie theater. At the seedy movie palace Anna Magnani dominates the films shown, her bigger-than-life personality seems to burst through the silver screen. Ozpetek even throws in a nod to Douglas Sirk in a later plot twist that is right out of Magnificent Obsession.
It’s a bittersweet, incredibly sexy and moving take on lost love, not to mention the undying passion and power of the movies.
