Ferzan Ozpetek’s excellent second movie, The Ignorant Fairies, opens with a subtly brilliant scene that resonates throughout the rest of the movie. At first it seems simply to be a playful introduction, but as the movie progresses one sees how cleverly and sensitively this overture prefigures and delineates the movie’s central concerns.
A man and a woman — young, attractive, well-dressed — encounter each other in a museum in Rome. They are strolling among the ancient artefacts; he approaches her, throws a pick-up line at her. She tells him to go away, she’s married, she’s waiting for her husband. He persists. She resists. Then, just as we are wondering at the strange tone of this scene, in which there appears to be a disjunction between what is being said and how it is being presented, the man casually asks the woman where she parked her car, and we realise that this is the husband she has been waiting for all along. The mock-aggressive dialogue of flirtation has been their mutual joke.
Next we see this couple at home. Every frame telegraphs domestic bliss, and elegantly well-heeled domestic bliss at that. With casual intimacy they perform their ablutions in the salubrious bathroom; she has a small altercation with the domestic worker. Husband and wife relax on deck chairs in the garden, looking out on to a pretty riverside view. Again, they flirt with each other. They seem the very picture of a happily married couple, well off, cultured, fashionable, in love, still sexually interested in each other.
But, as in the opening scene, this impression is not so much false as a carefully designed illusion (though of a different order). One doesn’t want to say too much about the plot of a film that is particularly good at finely tuned narrative shifts from the earliest moments on, but the domestic bliss shared by Antonia (Margherita Buy) and Ernesto (Gabriel Garko) is somehow fake. It will come tragically apart, and Antonia will go on to discover a whole other life, a world radically different from the apparently secure heterosexual union that she thought was her life. She finds, hidden beneath what she thought was her life, another universe that acts as a kind of devastating counterpoint to what she has thus far taken for granted.
What she discovers is a community of “ignorant fairies” — that is, a group of queers in the broadest sense of the term, a loose affiliation of gay men, a transsexual, some Turkish immigrants. These are people somehow on the edges of society, or at least on the edge of the society of which Antonia (a medical doctor) had presumed herself to be a natural part.
These people challenge her assumptions about the world, her own domestic world in particular, as well as the wider world in general, just as she, in some ways, challenges theirs, and these worlds begin to interpenetrate. Yet she too is an “ignorant fairy” on another level, a creature bringing transformation to the lives of others, even without intending to — indeed, she acts in many ways out of her own ignorance, though that ignorance is gradually stripped away.
Director Ferzan Ozpetek is Turkish by birth (his first film was Haman: The Turkish Bath), but he has lived in Italy for the last quarter of a century. The Ignorant Fairies is a very Italian movie, though there are Turkish characters filling out important subsidiary roles. It does, at any rate, feel very Italian in its rootedness in Rome, its dedication to a specific location and to the denizens of that place. It has a marvellous sense of lived life, of a depth of experience in a particular milieu. Ozpetek has said that the movie has autobiographical roots, though not directly autobiographical content: certainly, his sensibility has been formed, it seems, by the fact of his being an outsider who has become an insider in at least some significant ways, an immigrant who has been integrated without losing the clarity of a new perspective.
As far as mainstream Italian society is concerned, Antonia, in the movie, is an insider and the “ignorant fairies” are outsiders. Yet her encounter with them (especially the gay man Michele, played by Stefano Accorsi) puts her in the position of an outsider to their little grouping, and she has to work toward finding her way inside it. The movie has profound things to say about the assumptions the dominant culture makes about itself and those it perceives to be on its margins, about love and life in that context, as well as the view from the other end of the telescope. Yet it does not do this didactically; it does it in a messily, confusingly human way that draws us inexorably and movingly into the emotional lives of its characters. Above all, this is a movie about the darknesses and the illuminations of the human heart.