A couple of weeks back, Russian (p)resident despot Vladimir Putin reiterated his position as a valiant bastion against the negative propaganda with which the homosexuals try and proselytise amongst the motherland’s youths, in anticipation of the Sochi Winter Olympics. Moreover, Putin has a history of emulating italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s insistence on the beauty and importance of the athletic masculine body. The irony, I hope, is lost on nobody. It is therefore something of a happy coincidence that the Berlinale should have programmed Gianni Amelio’s Felice Chi È Diverso (or Happy to Be Different), a documentary that seeks to pick the minds of some of the gay men who grew up and suffered under Mussolini’s fascist regime.
Many socially-inclined documentaries are ultimately deflated by their focus on issues of the past, the contemporary irrelevance of which only underlines their political impotency. If only this could be such a documentary. Instead, it is mortifying to think that the pertinence of Amelio’s latest is constantly being reinforced by the recurrence of similar attitudes in Uganda and Russia (to name only two). “We can only hope that one day we won’t have to make films like these,” declares Amelio before the screening of his film at the Berlinale’s Panorama screening. He’s right in the sense that Felice Chi È Diverso shouldn’t have to be an important film, because its intention quite clearly isn’t to seek out gravity but rather to celebrate those who proudly asserted their difference in a time when that difference was likely to be beaten out of you (both physically and psychologically).
The documentary is comprised on one hand of interviews with Italian gay men who grew up between the early twenties to the mid-1940s, during which they share their “origin stories” (if you will) as well as various anecdotes on topics like the cultural prejudice they suffered, the struggle to come-out in a hostile environment, the progress triggered by the prominent gay community in the arts sector, and so on and so forth. Amelio can count on a healthy pool of participants whose diversity of personalities keep things from getting too repetitive.
On the other hand, it also spends a significant amount of time perusing tabloid headlines, image captions, and newspaper cutouts in order to reveal the extent of the country’s rampant homophobia and how it was actively encouraged by a moralising press. The depiction of some of the old-school caricature drawings and propaganda material used to “warn the masses of the dangers of homosexuality” bare many similarities with those employed to segregate the Jews, but they are comparatively less widely shown and provide interesting insight into the rhetorical tactics of Mussolini’s regime.
Given the aforementioned contemporary examples of repeated history, it’s something of a surprise that Amelio doesn’t take the opportunity to strike a comparison, instead resorting to end with a modern day young gay man as he relates the comparatively milder struggle he’s confronted to in today’s Italy. Perhaps Amelio means for the progress that has, admittedly, been made to appear in the contrast between the two periods, a noble thought no doubt but one that betrays a myopic view of an issue that shows little signs of dying out just yet.
