WARNING: THIS REVIEW IS RATED R.
Would a giallo version of Wiliam Friedkin’s CRUISING (1980) be more or less problematic than the original? In the case of Pierfrancesco Campenella’s BUGIE ROSSE (1993, only on DVD in Vinegar Syndrome’s FORGOTTEN GIALLI 9) —aka “Red Lies” (translation), aka “The Final Scoop” (U.S. release title) — the answer is less but with reservations. It’s an intriguing tale about murders among Bologna’s gay community, though it gets so caught up in its leading character’s psychology it sometimes seems to lose sight of the mystery plot.
Married tele-journalist Marco (Tomas Arana) is doing a piece on the city’s gay life, which for him means coming on to other men online and getting picked up (without ever having sex) in a popular cruising spot. He stumbles on a murder police call the work of a serial killer preying on gay men, and his best friend (Gianfranco Jannuzzo), the prosecutor assigned the case, suggests he cease his investigation. But he persists, following clues that lead to a cruisy porn theater and a swinger’s club (Café Urge, which is a name somebody should steal), where he becomes obsessed with a young hustler (Lorenzo Flaherty) and lets a female pimp (Carolyn Spence) recruit him for a city bigwig’s pleasure. All through this, his wife (Gioia Scala) begins to wonder what’s going on, and the killer seems to be dogging his trail.
Yes, that’s a lot of plot, and the film gets so wrapped up in Arana’s immersion in the gay subculture it often loses focus on the murders. The reporter seems to be a particularly bad investigator. He rarely questions the men he comes on to about their lives, digs up precious little info about the crime on his own and only stumbles on the mystery’s solution by accident. But the focus really seems to be on his psychological journey. Like Al Pacino in CRUISING, he gets caught up in the culture he’s investigating, though at least it doesn’t involve putting on a disguise or creating a whole new life. And the sex scenes are, at least on the surface, heterosexual, at about the level of a soft-core Cinemax film (Arana’s sexual encounter with Flaherty, during which he pretends to be asleep, takes place off-screen). But the heterosexual scenes overall have a curious subtext. Jannuzzo mentions that Scala was one of many girlfriends stolen from him by Arana, and when she’s worried about her marriage, he seems eager to get her back. After his encounter with Flaherty, Arana gives in to the amorous advances of a co-worker (Barbara Scoppa). Later, when she joins the investigation, she picks up Flaherty. Is there another film with two instances of homosocial triangulation? To put it vulgarly, the men in this film seem to be trying to f*ck each other with the women’s d*cks.
As with CRUISING, BUGIE ROSSE was met with protests by gay organizations. There are certainly some less-than-sterling gay characters in the film — a giggling peeping tom, a man into making his partners almost pass out, a thief robbing gay men to help his sick lover (I can’t be the only person to assume the lover is a drug addict). Yet there are also lots of gay men just getting on with their lives. It’s really the heterosexual relations that appear all wrong. Campanella also films most of the gay environments straight on. This isn’t William Friedkin leering like a tourist out of the Bible belt. The Italian film simply shows the places where gay men have to meet — the cruising park, the swinger’s club, the porn theater and a bath house for both gay and straight people. It’s all rather matter-of-fact. It’s just sex, after all. And the film comments sympathetically on the treatment of homosexuals in a patriarchal society. The trauma motivating the killer, a standard giallo trope, relates to their need to keep their sexuality secret. And the killer has made their murders seem to be part of the ongoing bashing of gay people, which, as one reporter points out, are only solved about three percent of the time.
titsay
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
discoholicmusic
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
