His Secret Life
June 2003 Reviewed by: Wes Phillips Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

His Secret Life is well made, well acted, and beautifully filmed. If that assessment seems better intentioned than passionate, it is a direct reflection of the film itself.

Antonia (Margherita Buy) discovers that her late husband was in the midst of a long-term affair -- with a man named Michele (Stefano Accorsi). The two mourners enter into a strained friendship and Michele introduces Antonia to his (and her late husband's) circle of friends, who seem to have been ordered in a job lot from Pedro Almodovar's casting agent -- there's a transsexual, a lovable loser, a frantic mother hen, and a shut-in stricken by AIDS.

Don't get me wrong, the film has a lot going for it and I have no wish to seem too cynical to be moved by its message that all we've got in life is each other. But I feel I have seen this movie before -- it has all the sincerity of a "very special episode" of an after-school film of the week.

In its favor, it does feature Michele -- a gay protagonist who is not campy, bitchy, or a cross-dresser. But he is surrounded by those stereotypes (and others) and that squanders too much of the audience's patience. The film also seems to lose interest in one or two story strands that ultimately go nowhere.

Although the film is putatively Antonia's voyage of discovery in her husband's secret life, it never fully embraces it -- nor, for that matter, pushes it away. She is willing to be seduced by it, but not to surrender to it. There is ambivalence at work that is deeper than Antonia's shock of discovery. That ambivalence belongs, I suspect, to director Ferzan Ozpetek.

He is a skillful craftsman and obviously capable of communicating with great subtlety. Here, he coaxes beautifully nuanced performances out of Buy and Accorsi (which is probably not the hardest job on earth -- both are superb actors), but he maintains an emotional reserve that keeps the picture from igniting. That may be a fair and balanced approach, but it also lacks a certain dramatic flair.

Ozpetek displays great ability in portraying the small gestures that illustrate his protagonists' growing respect and friendship. His Secret Life is handicapped only by his seeming need to make larger statements, resulting in a patched-together plot. He should have left well enough alone. Sometimes a story's real strength is told through its smallest details.

The DVD features no extras, other than trailers for Steam: The Turkish Bath and Harem; the other two films that comprise Ozpetek's "trilogy" of stories not linked by characters or plot, but by general observations on sex and sexuality.

His Secret Life is probably a better rental than purchase. It is worth the 106 minutes you will spend watching it -- just don't expect to be swept away by it or its characters.  

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