Frameline 33: 'Anotherworld'

Anotherworld (Altromonde) is Fabiomassimo Lozzi's radiant visual interpretation of the interviews with gay men collected in the books Pornocuore and I Mignotti by Italian poets Antonio Veneziani and Riccardo Reim. The books enjoy an almost iconic status among Italy's gay population and, judging from Lozzi's film alone, it is not difficult to see why. The film should be mandatory viewing for all entry-level Cultural Studies and Social Sciences students, so profound is its exploration of psyche, sexuality, society, and the radical ways in which they intersect. And this does not even begin to assess the integrity of its formal achievement, which is considerable. Lozzi has tapped the creative talents of the famed Actor's Centre in Rome (Michael Margotta's extension of the NY based Actor's Studio) and he worked with the actors there for a period of six months in which they developed and shot the series of 43 linked monologues which comprise this 106-minute experimental production. Between monologues the camera is lyrical and expressionist, with segments like connective tissue drenched in cross-processed contrasts, exotic flares of yellows, greens, and reds, with fleeting images of bodies underwater (the swimmer comes up for air after the first positive monologue) or of dripping leaves, clustered candles, weeping stone angels, etc. Its short spoken vignettes have a pronounced theatrical aspect; they are soliloquies delivered by characters whose tongues have been freed by the privacy implied in the form. Scenes range from shower stalls,steam-rooms, bedrooms and other interiors to graveyards, railway stations, and churches; they are linked by subtle verbal and visual cues which together articulate some delicate high-notes above a more profound narrative trajectory.

This deeper story travels the distance from self-loathing and torment to liberation and love, and it traverses such psychosexual peaks and troughs as are seldom acknowledged in films anywhere. Some audience members objected to the relentless way in which the film explored aspects of internalized homophobia, but to my mind its fearlessness was exhilarating, not to mention essential to any understanding of the film's message and the power of the subject in general. By including scene after scene of lacerating self-hate and twisted sexual fantasy, Lozzi has methodically built his case, brick-by-brick and from the ground up, and it is consequently a case of such devastating exactitude it is breathtaking, heartbreaking, undeniable. It has to be said also that it's refreshing to be treated by the filmmaker as the adults that we are, equal to the material and ready to contemplate the full range of impact our societal norms inflict. When we hear men describe love as a black hole and themselves as degenerates with no souls, as people you can't love, we bear witness to the devastation of the human soul that can be wreaked by majority rule and official homophobia. It also provides the rich black ground against which we can contemplate with clarity the meaning of the monologues toward the end of the film, the high end of the spectrum, where men speak of being normal and wanting the ordinary things that everybody wants. Sandwiched between a Vatican document pronouncing upon homosexuality as intrinsically wicked, and the words recorded at a gay rights rally in Rome which speak of the renewed hope of living in a civilized country, this compassionate and remarkable film could not be more explicit in its depiction of the contorted lineaments of the human heart. Anotherworld is hands-down the best film of the festival.