Amore Liquido (Liquid Love), Italian director Marco Luca Cattaneo’s first feature-length film, is a difficult movie to watch. It’s the story of 40-year-old Mario, a pudgy man who divides his time between looking after his mother, a stroke-victim, and cleaning the streets of Bologna during the night. To fill the lonely gaps in his life, he masturbates to online pornography. But something is about to change for Mario this August as the temperature rises to its zenith.
As usual, Mario’s sister will go to the country to escape the summer heat with her two young children, and as usual, she will take their ailing mother with her. It’s the one time during the year that Mario is relieved of his caretaking duties, but it doesn’t look like anything else is in store of him until one night when he is cleaning the streets. A young woman in a tank top and shorts drags a heavy box across the cobblestones and leaves it beside the dumpster. From across the square, Mario watches her, and then he takes her box home with him. In it are ratty stuffed animals and several DVDs of her vacationing with a man and young girl. There’s also one video taken with a cellphone camera – images of her and this man making love in the barely lit dark.
When Mario realizes that this woman, Agatha, has broken up with her husband, his summer vacation suddenly looks a whole lot different than merely work punctuated by bursts of online release.
At this point in the film, Mario drives down the street from Agatha’s apartment. Everything is dark except for one blazingly lit hotel sign: Hotel Diana. Cattaneo’s mise-en-scene is prescient. Diana is a goddess associated with chastity and one who looks after virgins and children, protector of those who are wild and free. Adding another layer of interest is the fact that the company Mario works for is called Hera. She was another goddess associated with virginity. The battle for purity is defined.
Now the question hangs in the air: Can a man who has immersed himself so fully in pornography transition to a normal, healthy relationship with a living, breathing woman? Can such a man have a healthy relationship with a young child? These concerns drive the rest of the film, and the answers are as ambiguous as they are hard to face. But it is with an unflinching gaze that Cattaneo addresses this modern malaise.
Influenced by the sociologist Zymunt Bauman, the director wanted to open a critical dialogue about the negative effects of pornography on society, a subject he considers taboo. Rather than point the finger at individual deviants, Bauman places the blame squarely on the shoulders of modern society: “At the root of this phenomenon is the prevailing narcissism of a society that increases and encourages compulsions and addictions.”
Whether this film conveys Bauman’s philosophy is open to debate. The images in Liquid Love are disturbing. So, too, are the images we are forced to imagine from the offscreen soundtrack. But they are generated by the perversions of one man who chooses to live an isolated life.
Amore Liquido is a thought-provoking film, yet requires caution. To paraphrase a former professor of mine: Be careful of what you let in, because you don’t know what the long range effects might be.
First Films World Competition
Amore Liquido, 2010 / Colour / 100 min, Dir. Marco Luca Cattaneo, Italy.
Schedule :
August 30 • 12:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.30.2
August 30 • 19:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.30.5
August 31 • 17:10 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.31.4
September 01 • 10:00 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.01.1
Writer Elizabeth Johnston teaches at Concordia University.
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This film has nothing to do with Zygmunt (not Zymunt) Bauman concept of Liquid Love, unfortunately for the film.