When
a man has both a wife and male lover, loving the latter more
than the former, convention dictates that he maintain the
appearance of normal heterosexuality while making up stories
so that he can spend as much time as possible with his true
love. In the Italian film His Secret Life (Le
fati ignoranti), directed by Ferzan Ozpetek,
the split life of Massimo (played by Andrea Renzi) ends in
an unexpected death-a traffic accident. As in Ozpetek's Steam
(1998), a heterosexual wife must adjust to a gay husband.
Massimo's wife Antonia (played by Margherita Buy) is saddened,
but in trying to tidy up affairs after fifteen years of happily
married life she encounters a painting, a strange note, and
a set of keys. Following the clues, she goes to the door of
her husband's lover of seven years, Michele (played by Stefano
Accorsi), and gradually learns about an entirely new world,
consisting of gays, Lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered
who form a family in which her husband was completely happy.
After her initial shock, she realizes that the world in which
her husband lived is much more alive than her humdrum existence
in the boring heterosexual world. She gave up plans to go
to medical school to marry Massimo, her high school sweetheart,
and the couple lived in an opulent home in suburban Rome,
but they had no children, and her only family is an I-told-you-so
yet supportive mother, Veronica (played by Erica Blanc). Although
at first Antonia is curious about details of her husband's
love affair with Michele, she finds more than mere fascination
with the group with which her husband felt at home. She feels
that she belongs. One resident of Michele's apartment, Ernesto
(played by Gabriel Garko), is an AIDS patient who needs intravenous
feedings, a visit from his lover, and a pep talk to take the
cocktail of medicines that might prolong his life. Antonia
can supply all but the visit from his lover and keeps returning
to the apartment to make herself useful and to learn how to
integrate herself into a family where she feels herself increasingly
at home. Much of the film focuses on subplots of various characters,
including a friend who wants to attend a family wedding in
a small town but fears ostracism due to a sex change; in the
end, the decision is to go as a woman and risk the consequences.
One day, Emir (played by Koray Candemir) comes to visit. A
macho bisexual Turk, who evidently travels from the bed of
one benefactor to another throughout Europe, Emir soon asks
Antonia to spend the night with him. Although she declines,
later she pretends to agree to fly to Amsterdam with him so
that both will have an excuse to go their separate ways, and
the film ends on that note. As credits roll we see the Rome
Gay Pride parade of 2000 that the Pope and Italian Prime Minister
tried to ban. What is most impressive about His
Secret Life is to show how a heterosexual woman
might cope with her husband's gay infidelity by posthumously
expressing admiration and approval, thus opening the eyes
of married women who may see the film to the possibility that
they might be happier seeking inclusion in the polysexual
gay world than in maintaining conventional values and living
unidimensional lives. The stories of each of the characters,
moreover, seem so much more touching than the subplots of
the plastic West Hollywoodians in such recent films as Relax
. . . It's Just Sex (1999). So far, however,
His Secret Life is a film for gays
that has not crossed over to the straight world. But it may,
and it should. MH
I
want to comment on this film
