Silvia Goes to the Movies #8: Maschile Singolare (2021)

This week’s film is Matteo Pilati and Alessandro Guidas’ Maschile Singolare (Mascarpone, 2021) available on Amazon Prime.

Feb 16, 2024

Maschile Singolare (2021), dir. by Matteo Pilati and Alessandro Guidas

This week the sequel film Maschile Plurale (Mascarpone - The Rainbow Cake, 2024) directed by Alessandro Guidas with Giancarlo Commare (Antonio) and Gianluca Saurino (Luca) has been released in Italian cinemas. For this reason, I thought this week it would be nice to talk about the prequel, Maschile Singolare (Mascarpone, 2021), directed by Giudas and Mattero Pilati already starring Commare and Saurino.

The shooting of Pilati and Guidas’ film ended just a few weeks before Italy’s first lookdown in February 2020 and it was released directly on Amazon Prime in 2021 when Italian cinemas were still closed because of the pandemic. The film tells the story of Antonio (Commare), a stay-at-home husband, who after being recently dumped by his husband has to find a new place to live and employment. He soon starts to work in Luca’s (Saurino) bakery while attending a pastry school. Antonio will find independence and life purpose again and maybe also love as he starts developing some feelings for his boss, Luca.

Even if the film is not a masterpiece, it is an entertaining and interesting product significant for its representation of gay love, especially in Italy where popular products still struggle to represent queerness - or generally experiences of minorities - without prejudice or cliches. The characters have depth and the story is well-developed without the usual plot twists or sad endings typical of queer stories. The film is not scared of showing same-sex kisses or love-making scenes, unlike RAI (the Italian National Television). Even if RAI has started introducing queer characters in its shows, it still struggles to show same-sex kisses and has probably never shown sex scenes between two men (or women). Therefore, although Maschile Singolare is far from being perfect, in the current Italian context, it is important to continue to bring to the screen stories of “minorities” especially when these are not tokenised. Hopefully, we will get more and better products in the near future.

All things considered, Mascarpone is a fresh and bitter-sweet film just like tiramisù.

Similar films to watch if you enjoyed Mascarpone:

The Italian remake of the Swedish series: Skam Italia. In particular, season 2 is the one focused on Martino coming to terms with his sexuality. Giancarlo Commare is also part of the cast.
Giuseppe Fiorello’s Fireworks (Stranizza d’amuri, 2023). The love story between two boys in 1980s Sicily. The film is freely inspired by real events.
Paolo Genovese’s Perfect Strangers (Perfetti sconosciuti, 2016): a group of friends meet up for dinner and challenge each other to read every message they receive or hear every phone call. The situation will soon go out of control.
As you can see, all the films and series are focused on man loving man couples, there is a significant lack of sapphic representation in Italian mainstream products.

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