With Italy not being a nation typically associated with progressive views and attitudes regarding sexuality, it was reassuring to hear the largely local crowd at the “Lord of the Ants” press screening of the Venice Film Festival laugh at the preposterous words of an ultra-religious woman on screen talking about how she “cured” her son from homosexuality by sending him to a saint. Whether the scene was intended to provoke that reaction is another story. In any case, the moment was a brief respite in an otherwise humorless film, pompous in the way glossy retellings of past national tragedies tend to be.
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The eponymous ants lord is Aldo Braibanti (played by Luigi Lo Cascio), an Italian playwright, poet, philosopher, and myrmecologist who, in 1960s Italy, was the object of a scandalous trial where he was accused of “plagio,” meaning of corrupting the mind of a young man. The trial, based on a law that was essentially forgotten and never put into practice until then, was a thinly veiled pretext for condemning a man for their homosexuality. Director Gianni Amelio however, complicates what could have been a straightforward tale of persecution, with his version of Braibanti coming across as a somewhat manipulative figure, more than willing to go from mentor to lover when he so wishes (as such, he is in some ways similar to the eponymous character from another Venice title, Todd Field’s “Tár”).
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Perhaps this not entirely glowing characterization is why Amelio’s film is inspired by Braibanti rather than a straight-up biopic of the man, with certain names changed and some narrative corners cut for the sake of drama. This distancing from reality could go some way towards explaining the film’s frequent lapses into overblown melodrama: tragic moments are held, often in total silence, for an exceedingly long time; the film jumps forwards and backward in time constantly, for no particular reason except to maybe try and unmoor itself from the inescapable logic of history or the specificity of time and place. In aiming for something more evocative and poetic than a simple time capsule, the film, in fact, fails to make Braibanti, his students, his lover, and the latter’s family feel like real people at all. Lo Cascio’s expressive performance — a constant smug expression in the first half, a stunned teary-eyed mask in the second — and his character’s annoying habit of quoting famous thinkers or poems to impress others, do not help make him a believable or interesting figure to follow. Leonardo Maltese is more convincing as the young man under his spell, but the latter’s faithfulness to the pretentious Braibanti feels more like a contrived romantic trope than a heartfelt truth.
The most interesting aspect of “Lord of the Ants” comes in the form of the reliably brilliant Elio Germano, who breaks through to the viewer past the many layers of artificiality that surround his own character’s storyline. His muted and affecting performance is a joy to behold — despite the profoundly ugly hat that never leaves his head — and it is no exaggeration to say that he singlehandedly brings the film back down to earth. This is partly a function of his role-playing Ennio, a journalist assigned against his wishes to cover the trial and, as it turns out, one of few people at the time to perceive Braibanti as a victim at all.
The character’s position as a man who knows nothing of Braibanti’s more manipulative ways is one of few interesting ideas set up in the film, but it is largely left unexplored, brushed aside in favor of a more predictable and unoriginal focus on what this case might mean for Italy at large and for gay people in particular. Germano isn’t spared his own share of highly dramatic scenes that don’t really go anywhere — Ennio’s visits to Braibanti in prison are particularly limp — but unlike the film’s leading star, he counterbalances the film’s extremely sincere tone with a more laid-back, slightly caustic approach that makes his own character, who harbors a secret of his own, a lot more intriguing than any other. This, sadly, isn’t enough to rescue an unfocused and ostentatious film that fails to say anything we haven’t heard many times before. [D]
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