I Don't Want To Talk About It ( De Eso No Se Habla ) - Maria Luisa Bemberg

If you must tell someone about a film, then perhaps say something original? No tedious 'saying of the plot'?

(If you haven't seen it.) Those (like me) who haven't seen any of Maria Luisa Bemberg's other movies, must doubt that they'd like them half as much as they do like I Don't Want To Talk About It (De Eso No Se Habla). Another one-off. A debonair and an oldish Mastroianni falls in love with the daughter of the town's store-owner (Luisana Brando) and the girl is a dwarf. He is true to himself, eventually goes against the town's conventions to ask for her hand in marriage. But will she be true to herself as he has been, that is the problem. The story glows with its own disconcerting beauty amidst a community that live a particular sort of idyll. In no small part does I Don't Want To Talk About It linger in the memory because of the town in which it is set, a town where everyone knows everyone else and a town of empty evening streets dotted with solitary saloon-cars, streets where the town mayor might climb the steps to the cheerful bordello, and where small groups gather routinely to talk in the evening or to play table-games.

Isn't I Don't Want To Talk About It an example of how a movie can miss its point (probably) yet miraculously rescue the situation, for the point it actually makes is as interesting as the one it tried to make? Surely the matter comes down to this - does an audience go away thinking  Bravo to those who dare to 'be themselves' (as Bemberg intended) or go away thinking For heaven's sake 'know thyself'? Different people will be taken by this movie in either of these two directions.

The intended point of I Don't Want To Talk About It is clear. Bemberg couldn't resist a card at her movie's beginning, a card telling her audiences where her feelings lie, and she unpacked her intention in subsequent interviews. She wishes to celebrate the unconventional people who find the courage to rise up and 'be' themselves (rather than let themselves be distorted to fit that particular people's conventions in that particular bit of the people's history). In this vein does Charlotte, the charming and talented dwarf, run away to the circus in order to 'be' of tiny stature and to have people travel and pay to see her be of tiny stature. That is the intended point. (See the movie as an allegory for other 'misfits' and for Bemberg's own life post-marriage, if you will.) No doubt this is what some audiences see. Clearly the interpretation is not inaccurate, and after it's been voiced, perhaps it seems convincing. But is it what most audiences come away with? Somehow I doubt it.

Don't most audiences come away with a different message from I Don't Want To Talk About It? Surely a great many of us come away from this movie thinking that Bemberg is trying to say For Heaven's sake woman, know thyself - for if you do not, you risk doing damage that others can justly call you out on? That you are perhaps going to cripple both your mother and your husband. That if you don't know yourself, you may well decide to marry a person you really should have known you didn't love (or allow yourself to be pushed into this marriage) and you may well fail to give any warning whatsoever that you're going to make no room in your life for your mother. The shocking bits of unseen narrative come at the movie's end - a woman who closes the shutters to her home one afternoon and is seen by the world no more; and a man who either drowns himself or haunts the shadows of the world's travelling circuses for the rest of history (so it might seem).

If indeed the 'wrong' point has been made in I Don't Want To Talk About It, then isn't the reason for that quite interesting? It's because of emphasis. If a movie wishes to celebrate a character's ability to 'be' herself at the end, then wouldn't it normally show the struggle? (Did Bemberg see that her celebration of those who can 'be themselves' would be seen by an audience as equally applying to Mastroianni's Ludovico and to Walter Marin's Mohammed?) But here we know almost as little about Charlotte at the end of the movie as we did at the beginning, don't we, for we see her from the outside only and she has so few lines to speak. We never actually get inside her mind. Surely what I Don't Want To Talk About It does in fact emphasize is Marcello Mastroianni and Luisina Brando (thank heavens) for they are very good indeed here. The damage done to Mastroianni's Ludovico and to Brando's Leonor is a shock and it is because we've been 'inside' both of them the whole movie through. Hence what most of us come away with is the need to 'know yourself' else - look at what damage you've done you silly girl.

You can come away from I Don't Want To Talk About It with either of these two responses, but surely both can sustain the movie's questioning tone - are these lives comedy? Or painful drama? Surely the most 'pointed' moment comes when Leonor is laughing (?) at the sight of her dwarf daughter walking down the aisle with Ludovico on her wedding day. Two townswomen dispute it - that's laughter, no it's emotion; and then one of them slaps Leonor across the face and pronounces that "It was emotion". And of course so was the movie? Or was it laughter? If Bemberg, trying to celebrate the unconventional people, has indeed missed her shot, then it really doesn't matter after all.

Secondly - isn't there a tightrope-walk all the way through I Don't Want To Talk About It? An equation which must work in the movie else Bemberg's intended 'Be Thyself' message will not come off. The equation is just this - that for us to celebrate the determination within a misfit to be that interesting 'other', then she must be a 'determined' person rather than a 'victim'. Our protagonist must be portrayed as 'different' rather than 'ugly'. For if Charlotte is defined as ugly, then her running off to the circus far from being the uplifting success the author wishes it to be, is instead a flight to her own comfort zone. If her appearance is allowed to predominate, then her flight to the circus is in fact a failure (she flees to be with other ugly people where she feels equal rather than less, and everyone there mutually comforts one another) but if her 'difference' is allowed to predominate then, ah then, the applause she receives in the ring is for just that - her difference. Though Bemberg seems to be aware of this potential fall from the tightrope, surely she makes it doubly difficult for herself because she does so wish to bring comedy into her story. There are at least a couple of scenes where Charlotte's appearance affects a predicament and she almost appears ridiculous. The large horse bouncing her around his shed, and Mastroianni clutching her in the dance, mannequin-like, come to mind. (In both of these scenes she is 'done to' rather than 'doing'.) These scenes, and others, predict a flight for comfort rather than a flight to 'be oneself', and they need to be (and are) vigorously counterbalanced with other more flattering situations for her. I Don't Want To Talk About It is dotted with moments of gentle humour and isn't watching the director wobble on her own tightrope one of them?

And lastly - don't others have to be at the top of their game to keep up with Mastroianni and Brando? This movie came along when Mastroianni was chasing as much work as he could get even though of course he may not have needed the rent-money. He wanted to work at this 'mature' stage in his life and would take up offers from across the world. Was this down to intimations of his own mortality, down to an inability to be 'at rest', and was it also down to the suspicion that at this age he might in fact be at his best? The young Mastroianni is what it is (not really of much interest to me if I'm honest) and was phenomenally popular. But watching the older actor's performances delivers a warm pleasure of a kind that perhaps few other actors have given us. Oh and Luisina Brando's 'mother' in I Don't Want To Talk About It. Her half smirks. Her glances - the eyes busy about, pause, and then 'say' what they have to say. She surprises you; her daughter (and not her) has 'got' the town's eligible bachelor and the girl lies down on the bed next to her mother; shortly afterwards mother arises from the bed and, oh how it is made clear that though 'down' this woman has been lying there in full Sexual Woman battle-costume. Surely there is no doubt about where the sexual force in this house would appear to lie (even if it ain't so).