just kidding. the embalmer, a 2002 italian movie by gomorrah‘s director matteo garrone, is a longing, brave, heartbreaking dirge to doomed desire. peppino, a dwarfish and very ungainly middle-aged neapolitan taxidermist played by a fabulous ernesto mahieux, falls in love with a spectacularly handsome young man who, too, has a passion for taxidermy. peppino convinces young valerio to come to work for him. but, then, who knows: maybe valerio doesn’t have a passion for taxidermy but simply a sense of the dead-endedness of what he’s currently doing. or maybe he’s just flattered that peppino should like him so much. this is only one of the multiple uncertainties on which this film so brilliantly pivots.
the opening scene, which if i’m not mistaken is seen partly through the eye of a digital camera, sees valerio, a young woman, and small child at the zoo. peppino is hanging by one of the cages. he engages valerio in a friendly and enthusiastic conversation that, i’m sure, loses a lot in translation though its feelings may very well come through in the characters’ body language. peppino acts avuncularly toward valerio, and valerio, in his role as the soon-to-be protegee, is uninhibited in expressing coy and excited pleasure and peppino’s attentions and flattery. the flirtatiousness is entirely within the bounds of the acceptable italian. it is no more sexual than most first or second or nth interactions between two guys who really really like each other. italian men, who are terrified of homosexuality, have developed an extremely charming and wonderfully self-deceptive dance to express their love for each other. repressed cultures, not surprisingly, have all sorts of delightful ways to allow same-sex people to flirt without anxiety.
garrone doesn’t spend one second explaining to us that the young woman and the child valerio is with in the opening scene are no meaningful part of his life, and you admire the dexterity of the narrative: having established a solid heterosexual-family backdrop in just a few takes, garrone leaves us to disentangle what is the matter with valerio’s desires.
peppino’s desires are not difficult to figure out. he is clearly very alone, but also someone with tremendous vitality. valerio and we are charmed by him. we like this unfortunately shaped man who revels in the minutiae and accomplishments of virtuoso taxidermy, is guileless and open, andlabors with an expertise that indicates decades of practice at loving men while pretending not to. he lures valerio with his generosity (a really good paycheck, among other things), friendliness, willingness to tutor, and a genuine openness.
we have been conditioned to perceive this kind of man as predatory — older gay man lures beautiful, naive young man with money and flattery — especially when the man in question is deformed and homosexual. garrone, it seems to me, attacks this conditioning at the root. there is nothing wrong with peppino’s desires or with the way he pursues them. yet, i am sure many audience members in italy (here?) would see him as pathetic and repulsive. i imagine, in fact, that everyone who has not experienced the agony of improper desire may well see peppino in just this way. if garrone had attacked the conditioning less at the root, maybe he could have convinced his audience better. he could have chosen a less unattractive man with a less creepy profession (the movie is based on a true story but i don’t know its details). he could have chosen to make peppino less openly self-abasing, less willing to do just about anything to conquer and keep valerio. but you can’t sugar coat the ugly face of prejudice and violence. it is a dish that demands to be served cold.
all interactions between the two men in the film are under the aegis of heterosexuality. their most intimate bonding, as represented on the screen, happens when peppino hires women for both of them and they have sex in the same house. there are intimations, though, of other, closer moments. i don’t know whether these intimations are such (i.e. only intimations) because of self-censoring or artistic choice. i tend to believe the latter because italians have a tradition of cinematographic openness (ratings barely count; the only one is +14 and even that is easy to circumvent. +18 is for porn).
the departures from the heterosexual script (and disguise) are a. a dream of valerio’s in which peppino is going down on him. he wakes up horrified, we don’t know why. b. a frankly homoerotic scene in which peppino falls asleep on valerio naked chest; did something more happen? is this a regular occurrence? is it an allusion to other, less innocent sexual encounters? did it even really happen? c. a possible allusion to foursomes with the prostitutes.
on the other hand, there are many, many scenes in which valerio is frankly shocked at any suggestion of homosexuality. this is confusing, and i think intentionally. it reflects what i mentioned at the beginning, the way in which italian men (and women) flirt with each other via self-deception, only to be horrified when one pushes the envelope and the h word surfaces beyond acceptability. self-deception, however, is extremely flexible and admits infinite adjustments and repairs. it’s not difficult for peppino to reassure valerio. and valerio falls for it every single time.
i find the representation of the relation between these two incredibly touching. valerio will never consent to be peppino’s overt lover — maybe peppino himself can only toy with the love that dares not speak its name — but they genuinely and tenderly like each other. peppino, especially, is open in a way that makes him — to the discerning viewer, who is, i suggest, garrone’s ideal viewer — really sweet and lovable. it is wonderful that this is not lost on valerio. on the other hand, there is profound despair in peppino’s longing for valerio. this beautiful young man will forever be the forbidden object, someone to be conquered and cajoled every morning of every day, forever. peppino’s labors, the cheery face he puts to his titanic job, break one’s heart.
SPOILER
i disliked the end entirely. it is a misstep. this is a film about continuous longing and endlessly deferred gratification, not a film about closures. yet, the very last imagine, in which the camera dwells caressingly, mournfully on peppino’s body, is tender. this was a much loved man, not least by the director.
SPOILER OVER
naples, which is, if i’m not mistaken, the site of gomorrah too, is never mentioned in the film so one can’t be sure that that’s where the film is set, but if it isn’t set in naples it’s set around there (accents). when peppino and valerio walk on the beach one is confronted by what italians call “abusivismo edilizio.” the mafia controls southern italy so thoroughly that it has built housing EVERYWHERE, on beaches, volcanoes, swamps, earthquake faults, you name it. since they are built by the mafia (or camorra, or any other local equivalents), these buildings are highly irregular and not infrequently pan flat to the ground or cause other kinds of disasters. they are also places of corruption, extortion, and doubtless many other evils. if you’ve seen gomorrah you know what i’m talking about.
along with illegal building, valerio and peppino’s strolls on the beach, which always take place in cold weather, highlight the desultory state in which such beaches are kept. there’s garbage strewn on the sand. it’s deserted. it’s miserable. yet, these moments are, in their way, romantic. it’s the same kind of tenderness that characterizes the whole film — sordid, corrupted, ugly, but enduring like the sea.
Wow–great and generous review. Gio and I traded brief notes on this, so she knows I had a knee-jerk response that pushed me another way. I *wanted* the film to be unjudgmental, open to Peppino’s desires. But I found his portrait–and not least because of that creepy job, but more on that in a second–found the portrait in fact willfully creepy and predatory.
In particular, I wondered why he was little. Such physical difference–or any disability–is so relentlessly used in our narratives as a synechdoche for other kinds of disorder. (See Precious, who is given not just molestation and poverty and race but a particular kind of outsized body *and* a daughter with Down’s syndrome–only in the film for a few moments, almost explicitly a simple narrative device.) It bothered me how The Embalmer also relied upon a correlation of various kinds of deviance, particularly grounded in his sharply-defined physical difference from the Apollonian Valerio — taxidermist, crime affiliation, homosexuality. And while somewhat sympathetic, I felt that ultimately Valerio’s return to the hetero fold, while sort of sad and tragic in that it means a very explicit rejection of Peppino, was licensed by P’s turn to a nastier, vicious treatment of V’s new love interest.
I like your sense, G, that the film relies upon such conventions but undercuts them, instead reframes viewer’s attention toward empathy… but it struck me that if such was the goal any number of small details could have accomplished a more explicit identification. This is going to be rich coming from me, but: the film too ruthlessly adhered to its generic roots to really reframe the “deviance” Peppino represents.
And back to that job: as a taxidermist, his “creativity” — his generative energies — seem tied to death. This seems way too creepy Freudian to me (thinking about other great film taxidermists, like Norman B), too neatly contrasted to the “life” Valerio ends up producing …. but, then again, your reading of the film’s open–where Peppino lectures about the life of the vulture, and V’s other earlier family is casually displaced… that’s smart.
There’s a lot that’s fascinating about the way the film DOES undercut the “deviance” of homosexuality through complicating Valerio’s desires, but I think it does so by crafting a sharper contrast with poor sick little Peppino.