With this engaging and informative work Catherine O’Rawe makes an important contribution to Italian Film Studies. One of the latest titles in Palgrave Macmillan’s Global Masculinities series, Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema brings much needed new insight to the study of contemporary film by addressing the particular anxieties surrounding Italian masculinity. As O’Rawe notes in the book’s introduction, little critical attention has been devoted to the analysis of male stars and constructions of masculinity in Italian cinema, despite the much-noted dominance of the field by male directors and male-driven plotlines. She rectifies that lacuna here with sharp analysis of a wide range of current stars and productions from the year 2000 on. Exploring topics often glossed over, such as acting, sound, corporality, fan culture and manipulations of race, O’Rawe situates her study in the context of a larger ‘cultural discourse concerning the supposed crisis of Italian masculinity’ (4). She engages this popular trope to argue that the crisis might ultimately be productive as it paves the way for emergent modes of Italian gender performance.
O’Rawe’s text is divided into two parts. The first, ‘Crisis and the Contemporary Italian Man’, analyses films set in a contemporary Italy rife with wounded emotional men and their nagging or absent female partners. Chapter 1 focuses primarily on actor Riccardo Scamarcio and his tenuous transition from teen heartthrob to serious actor, particularly in relationship to his own physicality. Proposing the idea of an informed reciprocal gaze between Scamarcio and fans, O’Rawe argues not only for the importance of the actor’s early female teenage fan base, but also for his self-awareness as heartthrob, productively manipulated in a film like L’uomo perfetto (Lucini, 2005). Chapter 2 then turns to mainstream comedies and their fascination with the middle-aged everyman, frightened by the looming spectres of monogamy, paternity and precarious employment. This chapter is particularly engaged with the release of anxiety, in comedies such as Posti in piedi in paradiso (Verdone, 2012), through liminal experience: the inhabitation of limited-term homosocial spaces, indulgence in brief bouts of hysteria, and impersonation of ethnic others, all of which ultimately reinforce the identity of the white heterosexual uomo medio. Chapter 3 further explores masculinity and emotional expressivity in melodramas like La nostra vita (Luchetti, 2010). This chapter is concerned with the role of the father, especially in light of current Italian debate about paternity and single fatherhood, and related anxieties regarding feminisation and labour. While O’Rawe considers the presence, and more often absence, of women throughout the book, it is particularly in this chapter that she considers representations of women through the guise of a Kristevan abjection of the maternal.
The book’s second section, ‘History, Nostalgia, Masculinity,’ examines films set in the past, predominantly those set in the 1970s and fuelled by nostalgia for that era’s clearly defined codes of manhood. While previous chapters all analyse multiple films and narratives, Chapter 4 is dedicated to the film Romanzo criminale (Placido, 2005), as well as the television series of the same name (Solima, 2008 – 2010). O’Rawe argues that these successful productions both reveal a nostalgia for past codes of masculinity, at the same time that they explore very post-millennial fears regarding feminisation and multiculturality. This chapter again considers the critical functions of performance and the body in representing masculinity, while also highlighting music as a tool through which to reinforce anxieties about the lessening cultural dominance of, once more, white heterosexual masculinity. It also picks up thematic threads of abjection and trauma, discussed elsewhere in the book, to suggest that masculinity is ‘in fact damage or trauma’ (115) in Romanzo criminale. Moving from one type of ‘fraternal’ bond to another, Chapter 5 then addresses masculinities reinforced through actual brotherhood in a series of films set amidst Italy’s anni di piombo, including La meglio gioventù (Giordana, 2003). Here O’Rawe introduces the notion of ‘middlebrow impegno,’ the expression of political commitment in films that employ stars, sentiment and mainstream appeal. She argues that emphasis on familial bonds and the use of melodramatic narrative presents an effective method of conveying and indeed crafting history, one that has been vastly overlooked in Italian film studies thus far. Chapter 6, finally, delves yet further into both history and performance through a study of the biopic, such as La prima linea (De Maria, 2009). In this last chapter O’Rawe returns to the relationship between audience and the star’s body, Scamarcio’s body, among others. Exploring the delicate task of representing often-painful histories in non-documentary film, she traces the ways physical (non)resemblance, impersonation and the use of archival footage or other markers of ‘reality’ all inform audience reception.
Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema is notable for the range of genres explored, from teen films to melodrama, comedy, political drama and biopics. What’s more, it offers a deft analysis of popular film criticism, audience reception, performance and star studies in the Italian context, while engaging in dialogue with a wide array of pertinent scholarship from multiple fields of study. O’Rawe’s writing is eminently readable, both theoretically rigorous and pleasantly lucid. In all of this, her book serves as an invaluable introduction to contemporary Italian cinema in its close relationship to contemporary Italy at large, as well as the complex question of Italian masculinity. It will endure as a crucial reference for scholars and students alike.
