Type to search

Tea

Is ‘Luca’ Pixar’s ‘Call Me By Your Name,’ a Love Letter To Vespas, or Both?

Share

Disney Pixar’s Luca which debuted June 18th is one of the best Pixar productions, well, since, their last film. But is it also Pixar’s first trepidatious step out of the closet?

Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie? Maybe A summery coming-of-age fable might be laden with allegory, or not, asks Vanity Fair?

In a dazzling Italy some decades ago, two young men meet and experience a sweeping, happy-sad summer of self-realization together. That may sound roughly like the plot of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, but it is also the story of the perhaps coincidentally named Luca, the latest bittersweet animated film from Disney and Pixar (on Disney+ June 18).

The film is about two kids, Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), who spend most of their time as gilled and finned creatures living under the sparklingly wine-dark Ligurian Sea. If they make their way onto land, they magically transform—in appearance, at least—into humans, free to interact with the landlubbers of a small fishing town populated with whimsical characters. Luca and Alberto share an intense, defining, and world-cracking-open bond, but must hide who they really are in the presence of judgmental, fearful others.

That outline holds an obvious potential for queer allegory, and indeed many Pixar fans tracking the film’s development quickly labeled Luca as the studio’s “gay movie”—a coming-out story to be placed on Pixar’s mantle alongside its meditations on grief, artistic expression, loneliness, Ayn Rand-ian objectivism, and parenting. Finally, Disney might actually venture into queer storytelling, a vast landscape of human experience that the studio has only meekly (and smugly) gestured toward in recent years.

Of course, all of that would have to be done on kid-movie terms. Thus the sea monster metaphor, tempered and universalized by Pixar’s usual cutesy, cozy trappings. Having seen Luca—directed by Enrico Casarosa and written by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones—I think the film will probably half satisfy those excited theorists.

There is enough there to graft a queer reading onto—Luca’s doting parents (voiced by Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) are scared about how Luca’s identity may be greeted by those who don’t understand him, for instance—but the film could just as easily be seen as an allegory for other sorts of difference. The boys’ washing ashore brings to mind the recent immigration and refugee crisis gripping Europe, as people fleeing war-torn lands are met with hostility and shunned by governments as they simply try to survive. Or the film could more broadly just be about a particular time in early adolescence, when kids tend to leapfrog over one another on their way to young adulthood, sometimes leaving each other behind as they grow into their true selves and race down newly open paths.

Casarosa has explicitly said that the film is not a queer story, that it is all “platonic” and determinedly “pre-pubescent.” That suggests a limited understanding of gay growing up, particularly of when our feelings of affection and special closeness and difference can first develop. It would seem, as it so often does, that in Casarosa’s (and perhaps Disney’s) view, queerness must specifically involve sex to be queerness at all. And, of course, Pixar is never going to make a movie, ostensibly for kids, that even hints at sex.

The film also evokes Umberto Ecco’s essay “THE FORBIDDEN VESPA-FRUIT.”

A FORBIDDEN FRUIT, AN OBJECT OF DESIRE, A MAGICAL INSTRUMENT”: THE ICONIC SCOOTER IN THE RECOLLECTIONS OF THE GREAT ITALIAN SCHOLAR AND INTELLECTUAL AS A YOUNG MAN, FROM THE FAIR-HAIRED VESPA RIDER WHO WON THE HEART OF HIS CLASSMATE TO THE AIRY ELEGANCE OF A GIRL IN A LONG SKIRT CLINGING TO HER DRIVER ON THE BACK SEAT…

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Vespa, Piaggio published “The cult of Vespa”: a collection of writings by distinguished names in the arts. One of the authors was Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016), semiologist, philosopher, university professor and writer, who achieved worldwide fame with his best-selling novel “The Name of the Rose”, translated into 47 languages and the inspiration for the film of the same name with Sean Connery. In memory of Umberto Eco, who died on 19 February at the age of 84, we present an abridged version of the article he wrote twenty years ago, where he talks about his schoolboy memories of the Vespa, which for him was a symbol of a sublime, incorruptible desire. A desire that remained unfulfilled, as the title of his article, “The forbidden Vespa-fruit”, reveals.

“…I fell in love, as sometimes happens at that age. I used to write poems about my languidly Platonic love stories in secret, because it seemed impossible to declare my passion openly to the unattainable She, the lovely flower beside which I felt like an importunate worm … I would meet the group of girls, and look at my Beloved, and my day was made; I was in seventh heaven! But sometimes the girl was not together with the group, and as I hurried on, fearing that some jealous divinity had stolen her from me, something terrible happened… She was still there, in front of the school steps, as if waiting for someone. And up drove (on a Vespa) a boy that I couldn’t compete with, because he was already an undergraduate, tall, fair-haired, disdainful… He helped her on to the Vespa, and each time, the perverse pillion-rider – so much the more desirable – escaped from my clutches forever.” Addressing the new generations (in jeans, miniskirts and hot pants), Eco noted “what perverse grace, what airy elegance a long skirt gave to a girl, as she clung to her driver on the back seat of a Vespa that swept away, and then disappeared…”
“This is what the Vespa was for me,” wrote Umberto Eco at the end of his article. “A magical instrument, which I never really desired, because it was beyond every possible desire, and at the same time, it frustrated my desire – or rather, it made it sublime, allowing it to live in an uncorruptible world…”

Back to the gay stuff: Aside from who it may or may not represent, the film is a nice introduction to summer in its intoxicating wash of blues and greens and oranges, the way it conjures up the heady momentum of youth, the thrilling rush of life’s pages turning. (To the likely dread of many worried parents the world over, the film is also a very effective advertisement for Vespa scooters. It should come as no surprise, of course, that Disney is ever adept at selling things.) Luca does well in that regard, though will perhaps be more memorable for what it might have been than for what it actually is.

Tags:

You Might also Like