Rialto Directed by Peter Mackie Burns
Rialto
Directed by Peter Mackie Murns
Starring: Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Tom Glynn-Carney, Monica Dolan, Sophie Jo Wasson, Scott Graham, Eileen Walsh, Deirdre Donnelly, Deirdre Molloy, Kervin Soobrayen, Alexandra Smith, Jane McGrath, Pat McGrath, Ger Ryan
Country: Ireland, UK
Year 2019
Author of review: Roberto Matteucci
Click Here for Italian Version
"You are handsome."
The etymology of the word father - Greek pater, Latin pater - has a Sanskrit root pa-: "therefore literally is who protects, that is, who feeds who maintains, who supports the family." (1)
To be a father it is necessary both to protect the family, providing defence, refuge, shelter and to feed it in a literary sense. Allegorical concept, about human and relational aspects.
Two fathers are the protagonists of the film Rialto directed by Peter Mackie Burns presented at the 76th Venice Film Festival. Colm and Jay are two unusual parents, and they are passing difficult and complex time.
Colm is a mature man, he is forty-six year-old. He has an affectionate wife, two teenage children, a beautiful home, a beloved job in a shipyard for thirty years.
The idyll suddenly breaks down. His father dies, the shipyard cynically fires him because his job has become useless.
The trauma is painful and instincts prevail. He meets Jay, a handsome nineteen-year-old blond boy, together they go to a public bathroom for a sleazy sexual date.
Even Jay, despite his young age, is father of a child.
Colm is getting more and more depressed. Unemployment, grief, tough relationships with the mother, with the sister, the disappointed knowing about the betrayal of the father with a neighbour, push him to the limits: alcohol and psychological confusion. At home the situation is delicate, his wife abandons him for incommunicability, the teenage son, Shane, assaults and avoids him.
He clings to the infatuation for Jay. He looks for him and meets him other times. In the last one, Colm declares his love. Jay's answer is ruthless: he prostitutes himself only for money for his family.
What is the future for these fathers? Can they still protect and feed loved ones?
For the author there is no answer:
"What I thought was interesting about the script was that it's about identity: this man is brought through grief to a place where he doesn't know himself any more. He becomes his own father, the person who bullied him; he becomes him. He takes on the role of the patriarch, perhaps unwillingly." (2)
Colm discovers a new identity at the age of fifty but now his sanity and his family at risk.
Jay is young, he started prostituting at the age of fourteen, his identity has always been uncertain.
Colm reveals a different sexual pleasure, an uncontrollable lust. Libido pushes him to a strong passivity, sloth, weakness. He is angry inside, and yet he is constantly calm.
Jay is melancholy, sad to look after his son. He is lazy, has no education and cannot find suitable employment. The listlessness instigates him to blackmail Colm but even in the extortion, he is inadequate and incapable.
In the scenes of the encounters, Colm is frightened while Jay is full of arrogance: they are two solitudes.
In the hotel room, Colm wants to talk, is pathetic and is pitifully framed by a light coming from a window with curtains. In that environment, in the bed, Jay becomes Colm's psychoanalyst.
Colm's demoralization appears in two successive scenes.
Colm is in close-up and blacklight in an office.
The camera is in the eye-level shot. Voice-over, a woman is talking calm. Colm has downcast, sad eyes, he is shocked by the words heard: his job no longer exists. He has become old, superfluous, he has been fired although he has offered to work on a salary reduction. Colm is vanished, like his job. Now look the woman in the eye.
Cut. Noise of the works in the port. Quickly footsteps, Colm is getting on a very high crane. Long-shot. Extradiegetic music is added to the sounds. He is nervous, he is fast, shame drives him.
Cut. It is on a crane deck and can watch around the harbour. He still looks down, is thinking and takes a step ahead.
Cut. Extreme long-shot, the camera moves forward toward the man, in the background all the shipyard, Colm is very small on the pier.
A fragment with all the thesis of the film: blurred personalities, pain, depression, families destroyed especially the paternal role debased, degraded.
Can Colm continue to be a father? His paternity dissolved in the Dublin harbour horizon.
Can new sexual research help him?
As Freud writes, the hopes are few, just analysis and recognition of own fault can remove the repression:
“A desire can be completely transformed into satisfaction if one obtains the desired object; in anguish this therapy is ineffective, since, even if there is the possibility of satisfying the desire, the anguish can no longer be completely transformed back into libido. There is something that keeps libido repression." (3)
Therefore, the consequence will be impossible and disappointing. He vents repeating many why but there are no replies. There will be emotions, moments of confidence, there is sex. Colm lives it with feeling of guilt while for Jay is just an obligation, it is a job to feed his son.
Their sex is not homosexuality as the director describes it:
"He's a father at the end of his rope, who meets a young man and becomes infatuated with him. He's not homosexual. What I thought was really interesting was that it's not about a man who is coming out, or who would even identify as gay or be gay in the future. I thought I had not seen a film like that before, where two men find an arena to talk.
It's also intriguing that both of these men who have sexual relations with each other have relationships with women.
And both are new fathers. The young character of Jay is an old-fashioned, straight-down-the-line bisexual character. In this arena, they are both fathers, they are father and son, and they are exploiter and exploited. I thought all of that stuff was interesting. As for Colm, the central character, he is lost. " (4)
It cannot be homosexuality, not even heterosexuality therefore just bisexuality can be justified and understood.
Yet, when in a motel, Colm orders Jay "fuck me raw", homosexuality looks clear and evident as in a Jeff Palmer bareback film.
(1) http://www.etimo.it/?term=padre&find=Cerca, translated by author
(3) Sigmund Freud, Clinical cases 4 Little Hans. Analysis of the phobia of a five year old boy, Bollati Borighieri Editore, Turin, I edition 1976, reprint January 2009, translated by author
(4) https://cineuropa.org/it/interview/377944/
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