The latest film of Italo-Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek, the astrologically-themed Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition), continues the director’s exploration of friendship and the miracles and meaning of life that typifies his earlier work. It is most strongly connected to his Le fate ignoranti (Ignorant Fairies / His Secret Life), using many of the same actors in something that might seem like a reconnection with many of the themes if not the characters from that 2001 drama. The editor of european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij, spoke with the director at the 2007 Karlovy Vary Film Festival where the film played in competition. Saturno contro is currently on German screens and will be released in France on July 9.

 

In Saturno contro, a large group of friends gathers for a dinner party at the Roman flat of successful 40-something fairytale writer Davide (Pierfrancesco Favino) and his strapping 30-year-old boyfriend Lorenzo (Luca Argentero). An unexpected occurrence takes them all to a hospital and, still later, the morgue, testing their bonds of friendship, loyalty and their comprehension of life’s capriciousness.

The film’s general outline, a group of friends rallying around a very ill gay man, is the same as Le fate ignoranti, and many of the actors from that film, including Margherita Buy, Stefano Accorsi and Serra Yilmaz, are part of both films’ ensembles. Still, there are many differences. In Le fate the group was essentially a group of young outcasts that lived in a working-class neighbourhood, and the same group now is a comfortably middle-class group of 40-somethings (both films were shot in the neighbourhoods where Ozpetek lived during the making of the film).

 

"I look at life in a different way," explains the director, adding that "Le fate ignoranti was made before 9/11, which makes the whole socio-political context completely different. The characters are more integrated in the city now, and more well-off, yes. They don’t need to worry about money, so they can worry about more essential things such as life and death. It is a reflection of my own age and the time that has passed since the making of Le fate ignoranti".  

 

Though the director admits that both films are very much a reflection of his private life and worries (though heavily fictionalised), he does not think he will revisit a similar set-up yet again in another six or seven years. "The group of friends I started out with when I made Le fate ignorati has become much, much smaller with the passing of the years. I don’t want to do a film about a group of friends that used to be very large but has now been reduced to just a couple. That is just a depressing thought!" says the director.

 

While plenty of labels have been applied to the director (including gay director, immigrant director, master of melodrama), Cuore sacro (Sacred Heart), the film he made just before Saturno contro, was something that very few people could stick a label on. The story of young businesswoman who experiences a crisis of faith was an atypical Ozpetek by any standard and did not do as well at the box-office as his more accessible melodramas.

 

"Not every film can achieve the same level of success," says the director, whose biggest hit remains the melodrama La finestra di fronte (Facing Window), a story that cleverly combines a gay love story in the past with a straight love story set in the present. "But that is not the reason why I make a film. Even for Saturno contro, the distributor said that if we cut the scene in which the two men kiss, we could perhaps add €2 million at the box-office, but I didn’t cut it. That was simply not the kind of film I wanted to make. I am most happy when actually filming and cutting a film, and what happens afterwards is not really of my concern. There are so many things that can influence a film’s success or the lack of it".   

 

Though often labelled a gay favourite, Italo-Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek has more in common with a nominally straight director such as German-Turkish director Fatih Akin; a director with one leg in Turkey and the other in an adopted homeland elsewhere in Europe, a chronicler not so much of the immigrant experience as of the experiences of contemporary global citizens that are always on the road (sometimes physically but more often metaphorically). Ozpetek has become very much integrated in his adopted home country.

 

Says the director: "I don’t feel like I’m not an Italian director. My name sounds foreign to Italian ears, yes, but people get used to that. I heard an interview recently with Ettore Scola in which he spoke about contemporary Italian cinema and Italian directors, and he spoke about Muccini, Moretti and Ozpetek without any hesitation," says the director with a smile. "Still, I don’t really think about nationalities when making a film, but I guess you could say that Saturno contro is politically Italian" – thus indicating that the film is indeed part of the ongoing debate in the largely Catholic Italy about same-sex rights. "I don’t think the film is aesthetically Italian, though, if you see what I mean. And still, I would like to make films that unite, not divide, people."

 

Also like in Akin’s films, gender, sexual orientation and background seem simply dictated by the needs of the story rather than any larger marketing plans or planned formulas. It is all about what works best for the story the director is trying to tell. In fact, for his latest project, an adaptation of the Melania Mazzucco novel Un giorno perfetto ("A Perfect Day"), Ozpetek actually changed what was a gay man in the novel into a heterosexual woman in the film. "I didn’t really buy the character as a gay man," says Ozpetek, "she always made more sense to me as a woman, so that’s what she became".