Movie Gazette

In an art gallery, as Antonia (Margherita Buy) is looking at a classical bust of a handsome youth, a man in a tuxedo comes up and offers to be her guide and reveal 'the secret of each statue'. 'Go away, I'm married', she says. 'Perfect, so am I' he replies. In fact this has all been a flirtatious charade – the 'stranger' is Antonia's loving husband of fifteen years, Massimo (Andrea Renzi). After Massimo is killed in a freak accident, however, the grief-stricken Antonia learns that her husband really was a stranger, with a secret or two about good-looking young men. An intimate love-letter inscribed on the back of a painting leads her to Massimo's homosexual lover of seven years, Michele (Stefano Accorsi), and his extended quasi-family of gays, trannies and Turkish refugees. The rest of 'Le Fate Ignoranti' traces Antonia's unusual relationship with Michele and his friends as she gradually comes to terms with her husband's infidelity and discovers a new independence and a secret that is all her own.

Ferzan Özpetek's ensemble film about sex, love, secrets and lies starts intriguingly enough, before descending into a sort of gay soap opera, where the many characters and their different storylines are all painted with thin, pallid strokes that leave little impression of depth or scale. The central relationship between Antonia and Michele is fuelled by a complex blend of resentment, jealousy and attraction, as they see in one another a reflection of their love for Massimo – but I failed to find either of them particularly engaging as characters, despite the very best efforts of Buy and Accorsi to flesh them out. When other characters are made to deliver gratuitous lines about how special Antonia and/or Michele are, you start to suspect that this is a desperate compensation for the script's failure to establish this in other ways.

'Le Fate Ignoranti' certainly draws an effective contrast between Antonia's chilly bourgeois life with Massimo in the suburbs and the more communal values of Michele's inner city apartment block, but lost amidst all the film's other contrasts (young vs. old, native vs. foreign, gay vs. straight, promiscuous vs. monogamous, etc.), you could be forgiven for being left confused as to what the point is. The subplot about the troubled Turkish past of one of Michele's neighbours (Serra Yilmaz) seems to have no relevance at all beyond the director's provenance. And while the film purports to portray Antonia's development into a newly independent woman, it was not at all clear what part her meeting with Michele and company had to play in this. Without giving away the details of the ending, it is fair to say that the one obvious change in her life has nothing to do with her husband's past infidelity, and she would have undergone it no matter whether she had found out about Michele or not.

So if 'Le Fate Ignoranti' is about a woman's journey, then almost everything that happens in it is a wild deviation from the main road – which would be entirely excusable, were it not for the plodding pace and uneven plotting.