08/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: In the Italian director’s eyes, the trial of Aldo Braibanti fifty years ago a is an opportunity to denounce homophobia past and present

Gianni Amelio’s Lord of the Ants [+see also:
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interview: Gianni Amelio
film profile], which is in the running for the Golden Lion, reconstructs the case of Aldo Braibanti, the Emilian poet, writer and playwright who was also homosexual and accused of using duress on one of his students of legal age. He was subsequently subjected to electroshock therapy and committed to a psychiatric hospital at the request of the young man’s family. We chatted with the director about his movie.

Cineuropa: Can Braibanti’s trial and your film tell us anything about Italy today?
Gianni Amelio: The film reflects modern-day Italy but not in the same form. History repeats itself but it’s never exactly the same. These days, the word “plagio” [translator’s note: meaning both plagiarism and duress in Italian] is only used in musical terms, when someone steals the notes of a song. But there are other forms of “plagio” which often go unseen. These days, we have civil partnerships, albeit with the proviso “like it or lump it”, but we also heard on yesterday’s news that a woman called the police because she’d seen two people of the same sex kissing. That’s where the danger lies. That’s where our lack of love and empathy raises its head. Progress hasn’t been conclusive on this matter. But we should be optimistic about the future. What I’d like with this film is to help primary school teachers who would like to be able to express their love for another man or woman without parents falling over each other to take their children out of that school   

The film is based on real events: you’ve kept Aldo Braibanti’s name, but you’ve changed the names of the family of the young man who was supposedly a victim of duress. Why?
It’s a film about Aldo Braibanti and the people who came into contact with him over time, especially during the trial phase. I changed the names of the real family members who accused Braibanti because I didn’t want to make it personal. If I’d shown how things went, reconstructing the story down to the tiniest detail, some people would have thought that that family had behaved in a certain way whereas other families would have behaved differently under those circumstances. I wanted to widen the discourse. I wanted to depict a family who were symbolic of the mentality of the classic provincial Italian family at that particular moment in time.

There are various female figures in the film. Braibanti appears to have an excellent relationship with his mother, but he also displays a level of misogyny.
There’s a scene where a boy is given a harsh telling off by Braibanti. There might be an element of misogyny in his character, I haven’t turned him into a saint. He’s definitely not empathic in the film, he even comes across as arrogant during the trial and doesn’t answer the judges until he’s convinced he needs to defend himself from the journalist.

I sketched out four female figures who represent just as many sides of the female consciousness. There’s a mother who thinks homosexuality is an illness and who tries to “cure” her homosexual son. We can’t justify her behaviour, but we can understand it and put it into the context of her time. Then there’s a mother who’s loving to the point of self-sacrifice, Braibanti’s mother. In the film, I wasn’t able to explore the fact that when Braibanti was captured by the Nazi-Fascists when he was a partisan in the Second World War, she went in person to ask that he be freed. Then there’s a girl who represents modern woman, who’s open to new developments in society; a woman who takes part in the protests of ’68, who places herself at the centre of a protest against that shameful trial. It was only a small protest, however, because at the time, people were ashamed of demonstrating outside the law court during the trial of an “invert”, as they called them back then. Last but not least, there’s a 16-year-old girl who I think is a moving and beautiful character and who might secretly be in love with Ettore. And when the latter leaves to live with Braibanti and a relationship between her and Ettore proves impossible, she still takes care of him. She cleans Ettore’s house, even when he’s locked up in a psychiatric facility. She’s a woman who loves, over and above sex.

You don’t have an original soundtrack for the film. How did you choose the music?
Giuseppe Verdi’s Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio ouverture is the leitmotiv for many of the film’s scenes. Then there’s the ouverture from Aida, which we then see a performance of, and the film also features a wholly sentimental and personal choice, a non-diegetic piece of music: a song by Ornella Vanoni. I always try to include an Ornella Vanoni song in my films, ever since I read an interview where Ornella explained that the last time she’d cried she’d been watching my film The House Keys [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. And then there are some really American tracks from that era, real anthemic tunes that you can’t help dancing to, like Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny and It’s Only Make Believe by Conway Twitty.

(Translated from Italian)