Benzina (2001)

Director: Monica Stambrini

Screenplay: Anne Riitta Ciccone, Monica Stambrini and Elena Stancanelli

Cast: Maya Sansa as Stella, Regina Orioli as Lenni, Mariella Valentini as Eleonora's mother, Luigi Maria Burruano as Padre Gabriele, Chiara Conti as Pippi, Marco Quaglia as Sandro, Pietro Ragusa as Filippo

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Benzina, which translates to Gasoline, is a forgotten film that is of interest in hindsight to LGBT cinema, from an female Italian director, about a gay female couple who run a petrol shop. A premise that feels post-nineties in aesthetic, its a post-nineties work with a slick punkish energy. Benzina's closest contemporary is Bound (1996) which was made by the Wachowskis, who back then before they came out as transgender decades later could've accidentally made a crass film but even went as far have an advisor to get its depiction of its female characters right, all with a slick looking genre film that just happened to be about two women in love.

Certainly Benzina is stylish, not excessive but neither of the Italian neo realistic genre in the slightest. It wears this on its sleeve by having a print of Nina Hagen etched as a wall mural on the garage wall, a legendary East German post punk singer, and even references her in a character's backstory, in which Maya Sansa's Stella talks, as someone who didn't know her mother picturing Hagen as her instead. One particularly piece of aesthetic style is even made part of the plot with the main antagonists, two chauvinistic males, whose girlfriend tagging along has a film camera that is recording everything they see and we the viewers see through constantly.

Structurally, the film is set up with the mother of Lenni (Regina Orioli), enraged by her daughter living in a romantic relationship with another young woman named Stella (Sansa) running a garage, is accidentally killed, the pair trying to dispose of the body with setbacks in the way, including those two men who are encountered many times in increasing escalation of dangerousness just because, as two loud mouth chauvinists, they're initially set off by Stella scratching their car out of spite. The film never becomes over the top with this, and honestly never becomes dated either, with the obvious exception of the drum and bass soundtrack. That musical choice is definitely of the nineties but works nonetheless.

Benzina is a loosely plotted film, the roadblocks in the way of the main duos' plan continuous as their own drama is told, including even when they are stuck having to let a disillusioned Catholic priest hitch a ride, providing them a monologue about the falsity of love as they drive in urban Italy at night. Its meshing with genre cinema is poignant for the simple reason it is cantered around a romance between two female protagonists, the more strong minded Stella and the quiet Lenni, which is arguably still not common decades later still outside of LGBT productions as it should. The Bound comparison feels right as, like it, Benzina is entirely matter of fact about its protagonists being two women in love with each other, mostly shown in their interactions. The few times it's shown physically, as in Bound, are slight but erotic without being objectifying.

And credit to Orioli and Sansa, they stand out as the leads. In a film which plays to some obvious plot tropes done many times before even this film - being forced to move the body around, a car pursuit that eventually leads the leads to a giant indoor party in the middle of a field, and a lot of scenes at the garage including the tumultuous sequence of property damage for the climax - their relationship is always at the forefront, always about their conflicts in their relationship and the clear love for each other too. Even the main antagonists have a sense of why they are who they are due to toxic machismo, even the sexual threat not inappropriate but a result of problematic behaviour and the characters throughout the film being drunk on alcohol and later drugs, factors which make their dangerousness not cartoonish nor tasteless as they eventually get riled up and high on coke like a pair of obnoxious idiots who cross a line. That the film's McGuffin happens to be one of the main character's dead mother, for a character with clear emotionally issues which causes her to act erratically under immense trauma to the scenario, feels natural to the plot and of weight. Especially as Orioli, in vast contrast to Sansa's confident body language, plays the bespectacled and mousy woman in the couple who is visibly with personal issues, and does it well, she makes a lot of the conflicts and quirks in the way of their task credible.

Obviously, there is the issue that the film does end with a tragedy without spoiling too much. This is more of an issue due to many films having tragic endings for gay female characters, the unfortunate result of repetition and stereotypes rearing up in cinema that naturally would make this an issue. In Benzina's defence, even this has a triumphant blaze of glory attitude to it that is exhilarating. Beyond this, the result is a good film, one I'm surprised is this obscure. I learnt of it when, back in the 2000s getting into cinema, I collected magazines for DVD release news and reviews, once ago when that could actually be lucrative. The review for this when it was released was negative, but the little it talked of, of this transgressive film which described early on a death and puking, which does happen, caught my attention and lasted over a decade plus. It's not as transgressive as it was painted, but thankfully, Benzina was something of great interest to finally uncover. Sadly, whilst she has still made films to the current day, director/co-writer Monica Stambrini has become obscure as well.