AS YOU WANT ME/COME MI VOUI

Italy, 1996, 100 minutes, Colour.

Enrico Lo Verso, Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Francesco Casalei, Urbano Barbarini, Meme Perlini.

Directed by Carmine Amoroso.

This is an Italian comedy of the mid-1990s, something of a curiosity item in retrospect. It appeared when there were more and more films emerging with gay themes, but also in the atmosphere of the AIDS epidemic.

This film seems to be offering a sympathetic perspective on homosexual orientation but focuses, especially, on drag queens. However, underlying the surface comedy, there is also the issue raised of the possibilities for intimate male/male relationships.

At the centre of the film is Domenico, who dresses as Desideria, in clubs, cruising with other drag queens, encountering the clientele driving up in their cars. Domenico is played by Enrico Lo Verso, longtime veteran of Italian cinema.

The police do their rounds, arrest the various drag queens, interrogations. One of the police is Pasquale, played by Vincent Cassel, who, it turns out, knew Domenico when they are at school. Pasquale is engaged to a young woman played by Monica Bellucci (a couple of years before Cassell and Bellucci were married in real life).

Then there is the sympathetic but interfering parish priest, eager to support Pasquale, fostering his relationship with his fiancee, aspects of comedy about sexual relationships. The priest seems rather horrified at the story of Domenico/Desideriaa, and encourages Pasquale to be supportive of him.

What follows, is a sexual relationship between the two, Domenico in love, Pasquale explaining the situation in a rather matter-of-fact way to the priest, to his fiancee, the possibility of the coexistence of the two sexual relationships.

So, this is a perspective from Italy in the mid-1990s. An interesting companion film would be An Almost Ordinary Summer from 2019, a story where two older men, with children, fall in love with each other with the children’s generation trying to undermine the planned wedding. This film also has the added value of two heterosexual actors (as were the two in 1996), Alessandro Gassman and Fabrizio Bentivoglio portraying the two older men.