The Lord of the Ants: one of the straightest gay films around

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

Aldo Braibanti was an Italian playwright, poet and myrmecologist, or ant expert. He became infamous in the 1960s when he was arrested and charged under Article 603 of Italy’s penal code with the crime of ‘plagio’, or ‘plagiarism of the mind’. The legal concept was a medieval one and was being used to condemn Braibanti as a homosexual because he had a relationship with a 23-year-old man whose conservative family objected.

Gianni Amelio’s new film is a sympathetic rendering of Braibanti’s case and – on the eve of an Italian election that looks set to bring to power a political party whose homophobia is barely concealed – it will come as a timely reminder of this shameful episode in Italian history. Luigi Lo Cascio takes on the role of the persecuted man, and his performance is a bold one: not only does it make clear that Braibanti wasn’t an especially heroic figure, it makes the myrmecologist seem particularly unlovable. He’s bad-tempered, bullying, fickle, a finicky man whose theatrical work is pretentious and whose love of ants is of a piece with his pedantic yet abstract intellectualism. It falls to his much younger lover Ettore, played by newcomer Leonardo Maltese, to bring out the best in him.

But Amelio’s film is plagued by its own sense of importance, which manifests in its sepulchral pace, with barely a line-reading that doesn’t stop for a breather mid-sentence. This works well enough in the court scenes where every pronouncement must be weighed and considered; in fact, these scenes are where the film excels, most comfortable amid protocol, holding on long shots of Lo Cascio’s face as he defies the judges. But when it comes to ordinary conversation, the delivery is the death of the real. Elio Germano, playing a crusading journalist who takes up Braibanti’s case, is a notable exception, but even he is hampered by the film’s reticence about his character’s motives, which dare not speak their name. Save for a brief scene at a party, homosexuality is portrayed as unbearably bleak and tortured. A tryst in a park ends in snivelling, muddy-kneed failure and even the love between Aldo and Ettore is played out through copious poetry rather than coupling.

It’s all as chaste as an AIDS drama from the ’80s, and probably for the same reason. Amelio is aiming to convert the still-unconverted, so he speaks the language of old sentiment: mothers cause the characters more anguish than governments, and demonstrators are remarkably well behaved. The film ends up suffocated by its own best intentions. It must be one of the straightest gay films there is.