The American Backyard (L’orto Americano) had its UK première 8 March at the Glasgow Film Festival for FrightFest
Pupi Avati’s The American Backyard (L’orto Americano) opens with monochrome file footage of the Allied liberation of Rome amid cheering crowds, and of Allied tanks entering the streets of Bologna. “During the war, my mother cut my hair,” says the film’s unnamed protagonist (Filippo Scotti) in voiceover – and as we see him seated in a Bologna barber’s shop, in footage that is no longer archival but remains, like the rest of the film, black and white to suggest a lost past, he adds, “but today my dearly departed wanted me to be here.” Indeed he is about to have an ever-so-brief encounter that he believes is pre-destined, as a pretty American military nurse (Mildred Gustafsson) enters the shop and immediately catches his eye. She is lost, seeking directions for Ferrara, which our man, who can speak English, is able to supply – and with a quick, appreciative glance back, she is gone again, perhaps forever, leaving our man filled with an inexplicable sense of loss and sorrow. Yet what is important here is that the film’s opening line marks him as a momma’s boy, and that he claims still to be under his mother’s influence, whether via mediumship or madness, after her death.
Perhaps excess affection for one’s mother is a peculiarly endemic male characteristic of the Italian psyche, which is also perhaps why Hitchcock’s influential film of mother love, mania and murder Psycho (1960), though an American film (made by a British director), helped inspire the popular Italian genre known as giallo. Certainly Avati is no stranger to gialli, as is evidenced by his sadistically artful whodunnit The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono, 1976) – and his other masterpiece Zeder (1983), though not really a giallo, also demonstrated his familiarity with the dead returning from beyond the grave. So in certain respects, The American Backyard, with its ghosts from the past and its remote house of horrors, might be regarded as a sort of remix – or resurrection – of these two films that Avati made some half a century earlier. Yet it is also a dreamy, disorienting piece of overdetermined melodramatic mystery in its own right, blending sadistic true crime with something all at once more gothic and more psychological.
In the Fall of 1946, a house-swapping arrangement with an American stationed in Italy has led to the protagonist taking up temporary residence in Iowa, in America’s Midwest, where he hopes to work on a novel. The suburban house where he is staying overlooks the neglected garden belonging to another mother, old Flora (Rita Tushingham), and by a coincidence so wildly bizarre that it defies all rational explanation, it will turn out that the military nurse, Barbara, whom the writer had so briefly met a year earlier in the barber shop back in Bologna, happens to be Flora’s now missing daughter. For once again, Barbara is lost, having fallen in love and disappeared during her service in Italy. After giving his new novel the title Searching For Her, the writer unearths from the garden next door, apparently under supernatural guidance or in a moment of literary inspiration, a buried jar possibly containing evidence of Barbara’s (or at least someone’s) grisly fate – and driven away by Barbara’s juiced-up, jealous sister Arianna (Morena Gentile), he will make a belated promise to Flora to find whatever other traces might remain of her daughter.
This quest will take the writer back to Italy, where Glauco Zagotto (Armando De Ceccon), a man to whom Barbara was once betrothed, is now on trial in Ferrara for the monstrous murder and mutilation of three local women, even as his brother Emilio (Roberto De Francesco), though grimly resigned to the likely outcome of the case, still tries to argue in court that someone else must be responsible for the deeply misogynistic killings.
Asked by Emilio why he is attending the trial in Ferrara, the writer will reply: “I’ve had a rather incredible experience: due to a series of inexplicable circumstances, I’ve become involved in a matter 1000s of kilometres from here, involving your brother.” He is not wrong: for the writer’s dogged pursuit of a young woman whom he has seen only once in his life is no conventional investigation, but rather the breadcrumbs broadly scattered along his path include implausible synchronicities, nightmarish dreams and even ghosts, as well as several older female figures – Flora, the innkeeper Doris (Chiara Caselli), an American egg seller (Francesca De Martini) – to furnish substitutes for his dear departed mother.
If the bowed saw prominently featured in the film’s score instantly evokes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), then The American Backyard too, like the 1962 Ken Kesey novel on which Miloš Foreman’s film was based, features a narrator whose reliability is compromised by his institutionalised insanity. The viewer is left to ponder whether the more illogical elements of the writer’s story represent his wide-sweeping creative process (as he plots out his novel) or his clairvoyance (as he communes with the dead) or his mental illness or a preternatural fate playing out. Meanwhile the writer’s uncanny way of both knowing and discovering things, and of always being in the right place at the right time, creates the alternative suspicion that he may be closer to these murders than he is admitting, as he chases his own tail and confronts his own guilt like a mother-loving Oedipus, always seemingly paired with older women. The identity of the killer is ultimately revealed, but multiple enigmas and ambiguities remain, and Avati does not presume, any more than he did in The House with Laughing Windows, to resolve the conflicts and contradiction of his homeland’s uneasy emergence from Fascism and war.
“I didn’t make any of it up,” the writer insists near the end of The American Backyard. In fact the film’s screenplay, adapted from Avati’s novel of the same name from 2023, borrows the details of its murders closely from the real-life case of the so-called Monster of Florence, even if those killings would take place in another part of Italy some quarter of a century later, and famously never be solved. As truth moves in next door to fiction, as history is filtered (and distorted) through nightmares in a damaged brain, and as everyone is looking for a scapegoat while the real criminals remain hidden and unpunished, a writer’s quest for a missing woman becomes an adventure (or indeed L’Avventura) in the chaotic madness of a postwar Italy still haunted by the ghosts of its recent past.
strap: Pupi Avati’s postwar murder mystery is a mad mix of true crime, giallo, gothic and melo/psychodrama
© Anton Bitel
