User Reviews

Peppino, the taxidermist at the center of this story, is a man who nature has not endowed with many physical attributes. He is a short homely man, who might repel many people. Yet, what he lacks in stature, and good looks, he compensates with a larger than life personality.

When he first spots the handsome Valerio, he decides he wants to see more of him. Valerio, who is working as a cook, is offered a job by Peppino, even though he is not experienced in that line of work. What he doesn't realize is that Peppino, in addition of stuffing animals is also an expert in stuffing dead bodies with drugs. He works closely with the local mafia boss.

Valerio and Peppino develop an easy relationship, but the younger man doesn't have a clue about the little man's affection for him. Peppino, who knows he can't force himself on Valerio, gathers prostitutes to go to bed with the two of them because that is the only way he can be with Valerio without coming out to him.

When Valerio meets Deborah, the dynamics between the two friends change; Peppino senses it, but he can't do anything to separate them. Deborah, who becomes pregnant, proposes to go home to Cremona and Valerio accepts. Their lives appear to be getting in the right track until one day Peppino appears at her parents' home. It's clear by now that Valerio must make a decision that will change his life forever.

Director Matteo Garrone, who also contributed to the screen play, shows he knows how to deal with this sordid situation with great taste and he is never in the viewer's face. By presenting the main character as physical handicapped and the object of his desires as a handsome young man, Mr. Matteo achieved a coup because of the possibilities in the strange relationship, aggravated by a third party, in this case, by Deborah.

The best thing in the film is Ernesto Mahieux, who as Peppino gives one of the best performances in an Italian film in recent memory. His Peppino is a complicated man who is trapped in a body that no one wants. Yet, his need for love is something no one can satisfy. Valerio Foglia Manzillo is awkward as the handsome man he is portraying. In part, the character, the way Mr. Foglia Manzillo played it, makes sense because Valerio's loyalties play a trick on him. Elizabetta Rocchetti appears as Deborah, the woman who is able to get Valerio away from what she senses is a threat to her own happiness.

"The Taxidermist", is a great collaboration between its director, Mr. Garrone, and his star, the larger than life, Ernesto Mahieux.

Matteo Garrone's `The Embalmer' (L'Imbalsamatore) evokes a troubling Diana Arbus Italy that's Fellini without the charm, Antonioni without the chic angst. (Clearly, it's just pure Garrone.) This moody, compelling film focuses (to add one more famous filmmaker name) on a Fassbinder relationship of hopeless repressed gay love. The desolate coastal spaces of the Campania region and the foggy inland environs of Cremona blend with a haunting jazz soundtrack to evoke a decade-old story of gay awakening and desperation, Patrice Chéreau's desire-ridden early film, L'Homme Blessé (1983).

You can argue whether L'Imbalsamatore is film noir: it's based on a police blotter item about a deadly Roman love triangle and has gangland crime, double-crosses and a femme fatale, but Garrone has created a slow, creepy character study that leads through initially cheery but off-kilter events into more flesh-crawling developments that drift into final sudden violence. It's been called homophobic, and indeed the gay person isn't stable or admirable: he's a lonely dwarf with a hopeless concealed passion and crafty subterfuges that lead into spooky delusions. But the movie isn't so much about sexuality at all as about repressed desire and confused intentions.

To bring yet another director into play in discussing this wholly original movie, the dwarf suggests David Lynch and some of the interiors and their lighting indeed suggest a southern Italian Blue Velvet.

Peppino, a little fifty-ish taxidermist, finds handsome, naive young Valerio in the Naples zoo and lures him by offering an inflated salary, into giving up his job as a cook and becoming his apprentice. (Picture the extra-tall Valerio walking next to tiny squat Peppino: that's Diane Arbus.) Peppino has extra dough because he moonlights for the Mafia sewing drugs into corpses. The sweet Valerio likes learning about taxidermy and is too good natured and simple to see the hidden nature of Peppino's interest, though even Peppino's Mafia boss sees it and warns Peppino of its danger. To justify being close to Valerio in bed Peppino arranges joint orgies with call girls. That keeps Valerio out too late and his brother kicks him out of the house, so he moves in with Peppino. Peppino hides his Mafia connection as well as his attraction from Valerio, even when he takes Valerio along on a Mafia job in Cremona.

While waiting for Peppino in a Cremona hotel, Valerio meets Deborah, a volatile young woman with surgically enhanced lips, and he and she trick Peppino into taking her along when they return home. For a while the three play around together and Deborah dresses Valerio in a nightgown and puts lipstick on Peppino. Eventually Valerio wants to move out and live with Deborah, who's now pregnant with their child, and that doesn't suit Peppino at all. Though Valerio remains ambivalent to the end, Peppino and Deborah grow too sour toward each other for the triangle to continue. The young couple goes off to Cremona to get jobs and live with Deborah's parents and wait for the child to be born. Peppino eventually comes after them and stalks Valerio, introducing himself to the parents as Valerio's `uncle.' Ernesto Manieux as Peppino exhibits a bottomless, maniacal charm throughout that is both smooth and menacing. Valerio Foglia Manzillo as Valerio is so tall and so athletically handsome that he seems peculiar too, especially in constant proximity to Manieux.

L'Imbalsamatore is about transformation and confusion. Sometimes Peppino is seen from far below and seems gigantic. He's physically unattractive and can be creepy but he's also charming, sociable and charismatic. Valerio goes from cook to taxidermist to waiter. He is a devastating seducer or childlike waif: his powerful physique is dangerous because the brain is unfocused. He's putty in the hands of Peppino. There's something of `Mice and Men's' Lennie in him, which comes out toward the end. Peppino's diminutive stature limits him, but he manipulates what power he has with consummate skill. Right at the end, in Cremona, he lures Valerio away from Deborah, gets him drunk, and tempts him to run off – where? To Cuba or Africa; Peppino has him mesmerized into wanting to escape Cremona's landlocked fogs and go off with him almost anywhere to get away from the monkey-suit uniform he wears at a hotel, the constricting responsibilities of fatherhood, and the generally stifling bourgeois scene at Deborah's family's house, symbolized by crunching the identical piece of toast every morning across the table from her father, with the mother coming like clockwork to pour the coffee and milk from two opposing kettles.

Garrone's Italy is a haunted place, drab and commonplace yet unlike any other. His scenes, which use a lot of ultra close-ups of the faces, are uniformly compelling: the dangerous tensions of the love triangle keep them focused. The various sequences in which Peppino tries to become intimate with Valerio skirt the edge between jaunty and flesh-crawly. The dialogue seems hasty, natural, improvised (unlike traditional Italian films, this has a live sound track with no post-dubbing). It gives a sense of convincing lies, mindless formulas that just get by or seem calming but cause confusion, mimicking an understanding that is not there. Background sounds are skillfully and subtly used. One has the sense of being in the hands of an exceptionally original director who knows well how to use the rituals and longeurs of Italian life to his own special storytelling ends.

In the disquieting, manic final sequence Peppino wields a huge pistol, which he talks about as if it were an unmanageable, unpredictable woman. His desperation has made him deranged and dangerous but Valerio also seems to have gone very quietly and therefore more frighteningly crazy. The ending is stunning but inevitable.

For those who enjoy creepy psycho-sexual thrillers which feature determined dwarfs who are taxidermists, sultry, sulky and equally determined Italian temptresses, and tall, handsome and dumb apprentice taxidermists, The Embalmer (L'Imbalsamatore) might be the movie for you. "It's a shrew," says Peppino Profeta (Ernesto Mahieux) to Valerio (Valerio Foglia Manzillo), showing a tiny little animal perfectly mounted on a bit of wood. "Very rare! Imagine, my cat caught this, and what a battle to yank it out of its mouth!" It's not long before Valerio, who is far too dense to appreciate a metaphor, will be the object of a nasty and deadly tug-of-war between Peppino and that determined cat Deborah (Elisabetha Rochetti).

Peppino is a very small (think of a thin and younger Danny De Vito), lonely man who has great charm and a sly, determined will to win what he wants and to keep it when he thinks he's won it. Valerio, a tall young man he meets at a zoo, is what he wants. Valerio is as good- natured and gullible as a puppy, and just as liable to roll over for the first person who wants to rub his stomach. Deborah is a woman who knows what she wants, is just as determined and manipulative as Peppino in getting it, and just as willing to rub the puppy's stomach. Peppino disguises his objective by arranging parties with easy women, but it's clear he prefers to watch Valerio rather than the females. Deborah is too experienced not to know what Peppino wants even if Valerio seems a bit dense about things. One would think Valerio would find himself in the best of all possible worlds. However, he's too naive to simply accept the blessings of circumstance and too easily influenced by the almost ruthless neediness and guilt both Peppino and Deborah use on him. As the story moves along, we learn that Peppino is in debt to the mafia and keeps in their good graces by opening corpses to insert packages of drugs for delivery. He knows that sideline can't be maintained forever. And Deborah, not only using her sexual skills on Valerio to keep him close-by, also announces to him that she's pregnant. This obsessive, bizarre contest over Valerio ends when he takes some decisive steps that involve gunshots and sinking cars.

Is this movie a minor masterpiece that dwells on neediness and sexual manipulation? Well, no. But it certainly is a stylish and intriguing film, even with an ending that dissolves into loony violence and a certain nihilistic artiness. The story is interesting, the direction has style and the director keeps things moving. The film features an underlying and growing uneasiness, especially as Peppino's obsessions grow and Deborah's clutching anger becomes clear. The best thing about the movie, however, is Ernesto Mahieux. The actor is probably no taller than 5 feet. Acting against the more-than-six-feet-tall Valerio Foglia Manzillo, Mahieux must project charm and sincerity. But then Mahieux must also show us Peppino's subtle and then not-so subtle intentions and his growing insecurity, neediness and desperation. It's quite a performance, and every bit believable.

Two scenarios.

Scenario One: A beautiful man meets another gorgeous hunk, finds that besides having a lot in common the hunk is down on his luck. The man, out of the kindness of his heart and more than a little chemistry, gives the hunk a job as his assistant. When the hunk is evicted, the man even lets him move into his home. Chemistry between the two grow until one day, during an intense sexual encounter with two girls, the pair cross a line into a burdening relationship when the man finds himself interacting with the hunk sexually. A lovely romance that makes your heart melt.

Scenario Two: A short, toadish looking man in his 50s meets a gorgeous hunk, finds that besides having a lot in common, the hunk is down on his luck. The man, out of the kindness of his heart and more than a little chemistry with the hunk, gives him a job as his assistant. When the hunk is evicted, the man even lets him move into his home. Chemistry between the two grow until one day, during an intense sexual encounter with two girls, the older man crosses a line and dares to attempt the hunk sexually. A stalker story that makes you fear ugly people who might think you are attractive.

The difference: Physical appearance, genetics, and age.

Offensive and repugnant.

Everybody wants to be adopted by a rich uncle. Everybody wants to pick up a girl who just cleaned out her boss's register. It's fairy godmothers and runaway princesses. But fairy tales are grim affairs. Remember the one about the maid who switches costumes with her mistress and gets stuck naked in a barrel riddled with nails and tossed in the river? Nobody wants to be the maid. There isn't much free in any life, heaven or hell or where we are. There are consequences to any act. Newton's third law applies to every tale, fairy or straight.

The action is a monster who can give you what you want. The opposite reaction of L'IMBALSAMATORE is that in return, Rumpelstiltskin wants more than your baby. He wants you. That's what he always wanted anyway, and there's not much in the world sadder than an aging troll. An aging troll is a desperate animal, like a junkie in his impossible obsession, but junkies can clean up. A troll is what God made him, and it doesn't end well for most of them. Peppino Profeta can maybe see the future, as his name implies, but also as his name implies he's a little short-sighted. Like most men he can't see past his erection. He gets in over his head and that's where people drown, but sometimes they take you with them. This little monster, pathetic as he is, could do a lot of damage. Matteo Garrone photographs this character from odd angles, relegating him to the corner of the frame much of the time to accentuate his marginalization.

Add to that the movie's grim look (the film is grainy and underexposed, packed with pore-opening closeups on the world's dirtiest beach) and its cringe-fetish situations (nearly every scene portrays an awkward or unpleasant social encounter) and you've got a prime downer of a story. It is creepy and nasty and willing to go places that horrify most people. I like it. When Valerio sleeps with his troll, the movie does not exploit his charity or contempt or self loathing, nor do we even know whether he feels any of these things. How often in life do we have complicated motivations to explain our acts? Much of the time, for me. People who are 100% sure about every choice they make live in an atmosphere immensely less textured than mine. Living in America I get very few straightforward portraits of weird worlds. North American directors who shoot ambiguous stories tend to be stylists like the magi David Lynch, Todd Solondz, or Todd Haynes. We get occasional fine entries by Gus Van Sant, again usually heavily personalized, and David Cronenberg keeps trying but only made me happy once. It's nice to see a 3-dimensional neo-realist take on the asymmetrical universe. Where better than Italy to find such a thing?