While watching Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Özpetek’s latest hit Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons), I kept thinking of a quote by the avant-garde French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau: “Cinema is about beautiful women in beautiful dresses.” Replace ‘women’ with ‘people,’ and you’ll have the parade of beautiful characters, and the essence of Mine vaganti.
Of course, there’s much more to Özpetek’s latest film than beautiful characters. The characters (some of them not so beautiful, in fact) are created with love, passion, and compassion. A box office success and a favorite with movie critics, the film takes a refreshing detour from Özpetek’s often stilted and distant work in the last decade.
Özpetek’s trademark crowded family sitting around the dinner table is a central motif here as well. But things have changed. This time, it’s not the urban upper-middle class, and it’s not the close-knit friends substituting blood relatives. The setting is a small town in southern Italy, and the family is one of the richest of the town. They are manufacturers of pasta, running it within the family.
Come out before someone else does
The youngest son Tomasso (Riccardo Scamarcio) comes home after graduating from a business school in Rome, ready to join the management of the factory with his older brother Antonio (Alessandro Preziosi) and his father. Well, that’s what everyone thinks. Soon after arriving at his hometown, Tomasso spills the beans to his brother, that he never studied Business Management, he studied Literature, that he’s an aspiring writer with a finished novel, and that he’s gay.
Tomasso tells his brother that he has a simple, and hopefully an effective plan to release his bondage from the family business. He will come out at a family dinner, embarrassing everyone and mostly his father, he will be shunned, and having disgraced his family, he will return to Rome back to his writing and his boyfriend Marco. Comes the anticipated dinner and before Tomasso is able to open his mouth, Antonio delivers his brother’s intended speech, coming out to the family before Tomasso can.
Their father suffers a stroke, Antonio packs and leaves, and Tomasso is unexpectedly left with a heart-broken family and a business to run. As Tomasso tries to figure out what his next step should be, he begins learning the business, maneuvers his family into accepting a gay son, and befriends the beautiful manager of the factory and a family friend, Alba (Nicole Grimaudo).
Change has come for Özpetek
While the film centers around Tomasso and his inner turmoil, we get a glimpse into the lives and confusions of the assortment of characters in Mine vaganti. The authoritarian father, concerned mother, alcoholic aunt, wise grandmother, and the frustrated maid become characters that come to life through their reactions to the “fiasco” that rocks the family and, to some extent, the town.
One character other than Tomasso that Özpetek invests in is Alba. The free-spirited yet fragile Alba spends so much screen time with Tomasso, you expect her story to tie into a subplot, open the way for a cathartic moment, or have any kind of significant role in the story. Alba’s character and story remain unattended to the end. Yet unlike Özpetek’s previous characters (especially in his last three films), Alba becomes a character we can relate to and someone we can easily like.
This is, perhaps, the true change in Özpetek’s filmography. He wowed us with his debut feature Hamam (Steam: The Turkish Bath), and the subsequent Harem Suare (The Last Harem) in the late 1990s, entering into uncharted territories with both of his films. However, the string of films Özpetek made in the last decade, mostly focusing on the existential angst of urban upper-middle class, featured characters that were difficult to like, stories with hardly any hope for their characters, and with an uneven pace that made it hard to follow the stories.
In Mine vaganti, Özpetek lets his control loose over his characters, and in the process the characters become truly likeable, and give the impression that Özpetek is finally enjoying himself, rather than trying too hard to relay a message. Here, he also shows that he has the gift for delivering comedy and comic timing. Now, let’s hope that Özpetek continues to like and take light of his characters in the future.
Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News on 2 April 2010
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