If we never tire of seeing love stories in the cinema, it must be to do with the unfathomable secret of how different times and places play a role in how scripts are written.
The love story between the transsexual Mary and Enzo, a Sicilian with a moustache and a heart of gold, started in prison and takes its course in Genoa's harbor district, a world that is close to disappearing. Pietro Marcello also sets a parallel plot in the same district, which documents and reconstructs the lives of Mary and Enzo in a simultaneously truthful and fictitious manner. Combining scenes from today and images from the past that Marcello found in various public and private treasure chests, La bocca del lupo uncovers a city both melancholy and audacious, where the women at the bars speak in voices nearly as deep of those of the men with whom they drink and where those stranded there have never been able to escape the unreal, forgotten places of the harbor. It's as if Genoa's harbor district actually invented the love story between Mary and Enzo. Pietro Marcello has reconstructed this love story in the form of a script for a documentary, which uses distinctive music, memories and archive material to bring a barely visible past back to life.
Dorothee Wenner
Production: Indigo Film, Rome; L’Avventurosa Film, Milan
Screenplay, Camera: Pietro Marcello
Format: 35mm (filmed on DV), color
Running time: 75 min.
Language: Italian
