truth that cannot be told
by Douglas Messerli
Gianni
Romoli and Ferzan Ozpetek (screenplay), Ferzan Ozpetek (director) Le fate ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies), USA a.k.a His Secret Life / 2001, USA 2002
Written and filmed in Italy,
Turkish-born directors Ferzan Ozpetek's Le
fate ignoranti begins with a beautiful woman, Antonia (Margherita Buy),
strolling through a ancient art exhibit, where she is, so it appears, accosted
by a handsome man, Massimo (Andrea Renzi), who attempts to pick her up, Antonia
telling him to go away. She is waiting for her husband, she proclaims, who is
quite late, to which Massimo reacts with shock that he should leave such a
beautiful wife alone. The two go off together for what appears as a night of
sex at her posh Rome apartment.
In fact, the two are husband and wife, playing a sort of romantic game,
she playfully chiding him for his lateness, he apologizing in the role of a
stranger, the first of a series of this film's dramatized "lies."
Antonia, we later discover with the help of her mother, is a woman
"not very curious about life." Marrying her schoolmate, Massimo, she
has given up her post-doctoral ambitions, working instead as a doctor in an
AIDS laboratory. Her life in an upper-class villa is a pleasant one, and her
marriage seems near perfect.
Massimo is killed by a passing car, however, a day or so later, and
Antonia, bereft and in shock, begins to gather up his possessions from his
office, painfully trying to piece memories of their life together. In the
process she accidentally uncovers, on the back of one of his office paintings
the following hand-written message:
To Massimo, for our seven
years together, for that part of you that
I miss and I will never
have, for every time you said I can't, but
also for every time you
said I'll be back... Always waiting, can I call
my patience love? Your
ignorant fairy
Antonia tracks down the lover in the market, presuming it is the beautiful
woman standing next to a handsome young man. But when she returns to the
apartment, there is no beautiful woman, but only a room of gay, transgender,
and other figures, including the young man, Michele, who she has spotted at the
market. Bit by bit, the truth comes storming over her uncomprehending mind:
Massimo's lover was Michele, another man.
Revealing part of the story to her mother, Antonia tries to gather the
strands of remaining reality together; but her mother has seemingly more
sympathy for the lover than for her own daughter, revealing that she also spent
most of her life loving a married man. The irony is, at first, comic, but is
also revelatory of just how self-centered Antonia has been. She has never
noticed anything unusual about her mother or her husband! If Michele has
characterized himself as "the ignorant fairy," it is, in truth, Antonia
who has lived in ignorance, in a fairy-tale world. The small community of Michele's
rooftop apartment was completely aware of Antonia's presence, of her robbery of
the man they all clearly felt was one of them.
Clearly if she wants to discover all the things she never knew, she must
return to Michele's house, joining in his and his friends' witty lunch and
dinner time conversations, and gradually she does so, discerning some close
connections to her rival. When Michele reports how he and Massimo met, both of
them desiring the same rare book by the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, she reveals
that the book was a gift to her, that Massimo had never read Hikmet, quoting an
entire poem she has learned by heart.
Michele's open and joyful manner, moreover, attracts her. He has even
given out a room to a friend, Ernesto, dying of AIDS, to whom Antonia begins to
minister. In short, while Massimo's and her relationship has been a cloistered
one, Massimo's and Michele's love has been shared with a supportive community
of outsiders. And in that sense, the film becomes, symbolically speaking, a
discussion of insider and outsider love, of truth-telling and a world in which
the truth cannot be spoken. Which is which is often hard to say, but it is
clear that Antonia's life has been lived with a deeper sense of separation than
Michele's. If Michele has had Massimo only for a few hours each week—a time
when Massimo claimed he was attending soccer matches—it has been a far more open
proclamation of love that her marriage.
Throughout the film, Antonia flits back and forth between her former and
new reality as if she were in a sort of fever, never fully breaking through the
net in which she has found herself. Finally, however, it dawns on her that
something else is happening to her very body, as she discovers she is pregnant
with Massimo's child. Excited by the news, she buys a bottle of champagne to
celebrate her announcement to Michele and his friends. As she enters the
apartment, however, she overhears catty comments about her, freezes, and exits,
determining to leave Rome for an undetermined destination and period.
Ozpetek gives us no answers. She may return with the child, gradually
integrating it into her husband's other half of his life. What eventually we do
know for certain is that Antonia cannot ever return to the deep incurious
ignorance (can never again be "the ignorant fairy"), the condition in
which she spent so much of her life.
Los Angeles,
March 31, 2012
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