To Be Twenty (Avere vent’anni) (1978) - Brucia, ragazzo, brucia (1969) - Dir.: Fernando Di Leo
The Italian filmmaker Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003) has enjoyed posthumous resurgence in popularity, largely due to the crime thrillers he made during the 1970s. These hardboiled, violent, but strangely introspective movies have had the good fortune of falling into line with 21st-century notions of what makes for a proper action outing, especially the misogynist notion that women don’t belong on-screen unless they’re naked or firing a gun (or both).
But although Di Leo usually found a reason to undress his actresses, he generally avoided reducing them to the level of adolescents’ fetish objects. In La Mala ordina (1972), for example, he joined his contemporary Marco Bellocchio in unmasking sexual hypocrisy among young men of the “revolutionary” left. Going a bit further than Bellocchio, Di Leo oversaw the absorption of the female perspective into his film’s structure.
In 1978, Di Leo was able to film To Be Twenty (Avere vent’anni) from a script he had written several years earlier. Superficially, it starts out as an erotic comedy, one of the genres the Italian film industry was busily mass-producing, unaware that the bottom was about to fall out of their markets in just a couple of years. The set-up comes right out of the genre’s playbook: Two sexy and sexually liberated young women head from the provinces to Rome in pursuit of the sybaritic delights that are supposed to be found there.
In a more conventional film, cool blond Lia (Gloria Guida) and tempestuous brunette Tina (Lilli Carati) would have crashed the city limits, stripped down, and leaped from bed to bed with increasing delight. But To Be Twenty turns out to be the story of Lia and Tina’s sexual disillusionment, one that comes amid a welter of others. For one thing, the “commune” they seek out turns out to be presided over by a Wizard of Oz-type fraud who, counter-culture ideals notwithstanding, charges rent. When the women try to “get laid” (their phrase), they find out the resident men are too drugged, too meditative, or too gross for sex. A couple of teenage boys are presented for their enjoyment, but the kids take only seconds to climax and leave the frustrated women to relieve their pent-up desire with an episode of ad-hoc lesbianism (suitably photographed). As a comedy of sexual frustration, it’s up there with Douglas Sirk’s underappreciated No Room for the Groom (1952).
Tina does manage to score a breakthrough when she finally seduces Rico (genre mainstay Ray Lovelock). Rico is almost never awake, but Tina has been so drawn to him that she can barely keep herself from molesting him in his sleep (the scene where she almost does, then decides not to, is one of the best examples of how the movie’s perverse comedy courts, but avoids, being mere perversity).
Rico’s constant slumbering is one of the running jokes that suddenly starts becoming serious in the movie’s final third. A police informant has planted some dope in the house; the cops raid the commune and take everyone in for interrogation. Rico, as expected, keeps nodding off during questioning, until a detective taunts him for his “apathy.” Rico is temporarily roused to denouncing the vast hypocrisies of modern Italy, declaring that apathy is the only reasonable response to everyday social monstrousness. No laugh lines here.
Clearly, one of the hypocrisies Rico has in mind is the sexual variety. Wanting only to enjoy the same sexual freedom men possess, Lia and Tina have run into occasional censure and almost uniform indifference. They only want a roll in the hay – albeit one that will lead to their own orgasms, not just their partners’ – but they don’t even get the chance to nag/plead/demand for it the way men can. By having Rico talk about hypocrisy to cops who had earlier called Lia and Tina sluts, Di Leo is going further than saying women shouldn’t be denied multiple partners. He’s saying that women have a right to expect a little cooperation from men, even if their hearts aren’t totally in it.
The movie has retained a comic tone even through these sequences, but it’s about to drop it with a vengeance. Formally expelled from Rome by the police, Lia and Tina hitchhike back home. On the way, the stop off for lunch at a small working-man’s restaurant about a kilometer off the main highway.
From the moment they step inside, you know there’s going to be trouble. Di Leo is a master at establishing the threat of male violence, and though at first you don’t see anything more than a dozen average-looking guys eating at a table together, it’s obvious that when as Tina starts dancing to the juke box, she’s entered a gladiators arena.
In the next minute or so, Di Leo establishes the wide variety of male types that can make up such a group and how they can all share the same vile idea. Angered that the women think they can dance in their tiny cut-offs and then not “put out,” the men turn on them. What follows, shot and cut with Di Leo’s usual precision, is certainly one of the most upsetting gang-rape ever put on film.
It may seem that Di Leo is pulling the rug out from under his viewers, titillating them with light comedy only to bash them with criminal horror. But, as they say, that’s a long way to go for one drink of water. Rather, he was simply playing out the implications of the comic sections without regard to genre demands or audience comfort. Indifference and distaste logically give way to violence in To Be Twenty and if that realization requires a little shock, says Di Leo, then so be it.
In an interview, Di Leo said that he didn’t know why there had been surprise over his attitudes in To Be Twenty when he had made his feelings quite clear almost a decade earlier in 1969’s Brucia, ragazzo, brucia (literally, Burn, Boy, Burn). A different sort of movie in many ways – it fits into the “erotic drama” genre quite comfortably – Brucia does insist on a woman’s right to sexual pleasure, a right so primary that if a husband can’t or won’t give her an orgasm, she should find someone who can. With less reason than in Twenty, the younger Di Leo couldn’t come up with a non-tragic ending, which seems a bit timid on his part. But given his choice, he executes it superbly, and the sequence of male insensitivity to female suffering is nearly unnerving.
It looks like Di Leo had about ten dollars to make Bruscia, and most of that had to be spent on its star (or sort of star) Françoise Prévost (who is quite good). The action is set at a deserted, third-rate resort but Di Leo makes the setting work for him, as it blankets the characters in a kind of forced good cheer, as if they’re determined to have a nice vacation despite the depressing circumstances (a typical English vacation, in other words).
Prévost plays the wife of a business executive who leaves her, their daughter, and another relative (called an aunt in the English dub, but who looks more like a cousin). The woman, Clara, has had unsettling dreams, including one where her husband is sending her to be with his boss and which ends with her kissing a mysterious woman. Yes, it’s a blunt way of indicating something isn’t right, but it’s cheeky, too, almost Fuller-esque in its brashness.
The cabana boy at the beach, with the connivance of his (usually half-dressed, if at all) girlfriend, plans to seduce Clara as soon as he sees her, not just for the thrill, but because he likes to make “the middle classes” feel bad. Thus Clara, though she’ll benefit from the young man’s sexual prowess, will have trouble avoiding a repeat of the same negations she suffers at the hands of her husband.
In a pithy, running subplot, Di Leo demonstrates how deeply the male perquisite to dominate women has infiltrated family life. Clara’s 10-year-old daughter, Monica, is a Mickey Mouse fan, but a little boy she befriends prefers Snoopy, Lucy and other Charles Schulz characters. When he browbeats her into switching allegiances, the light tone makes it seem like Di Leo is introducing some cutesy comic relief. But, by the movie’s midpoint, the little boy is hanging Monica’s doll from a toy gallows and, near the end, the little girl is sadly sketching pictures of Snoopy. It turns out creepier than anything else in the movie – and that’s saying something.