La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf), Pietro Marcello’s haunting 2009 documentary, is one of the most original love stories ever committed to film. Neither strictly documentary nor purely fiction, the film follows the 20-year romance between a rugged Sicilian ex-convict named Vincenzo Motta, known as Enzo, and Mary Monaco, a trans woman and former convict herself. It is a love that emerged from the shadows of Genoa’s prison walls and endured through decades of hardship, addiction, displacement, and poverty. Marcello weaves their lives into a poetic meditation not only on love but on time, class, gender, urban decay, and the aching pull of memory.
The film begins as a brooding, dreamlike evocation of Genoa’s past and present, fusing atmospheric images of the industrial port city with archival footage and personal testimony. Marcello transforms Genoa into a third character, a ghostly, decaying backdrop against which the love between Enzo and Mary is gradually revealed. Their story unspools gently: Enzo, a career criminal shaped by violence and street survival, returns from prison to find Mary, who waited faithfully for him. Though she struggles with heroin addiction and the scars of marginalization, Mary embodies longing, devotion, and an almost impossible resilience. Theirs is not a conventional romance. It is raw, asymmetric, and hard-earned. Mary’s voice, soft, confessional, unguarded, narrates the film’s most intimate truths. She talks about waiting for Enzo while selling sex to survive, about writing him letters filled with yearning and loneliness. Enzo’s presence is more guarded, his love for Mary buried under layers of stoicism, pride, and trauma. But when they sit side-by-side on a worn couch, bickering tenderly over the nature of their bond, the full power of their connection becomes evident. These scenes are heartbreakingly tender, stripped of pretense, filled with small gestures that echo loudly: a shared glance, a half-smile, a nervous laugh.
Marcello never presents Mary as a symbol or a cause. She is fully human, full of contradictions and beauty. Her gender identity is neither a plot twist nor a problem to be solved. Instead, Marcello foregrounds her strength and dignity, how she built a life in a hostile world, how she loved Enzo with such unwavering fidelity. Likewise, Enzo is no cliché of toxic masculinity. He is a broken man, shaped by a brutal system, and yet he softens in Mary’s presence. In a cinematic landscape where queer relationships are too often sanitized or dramatized to extremes, their story feels real, achingly, brutally real. And yet La bocca del lupo is more than a love story. It is also a lament for Genoa itself. The city, once a powerful maritime and industrial center, is rendered here as a crumbling relic of its former self. Marcello uses archival footage, of striking workers, of ships being launched or dismantled, of neighborhoods now lost, to evoke the passage of time. This historical consciousness imbues the film with a melancholic grandeur. The ruins of Genoa mirror the ruins in its characters: working-class people left behind by progress, searching for something solid in a world of decline.
Marcello achieves this synthesis of personal and political through his singular visual style. His camera roams the city like a ghost, lingering on shuttered windows, graffiti-covered walls, abandoned factories. He intersperses these shots with footage of Enzo walking through Genoa’s narrow streets, footage of Mary speaking directly to the camera, and recordings of their voices reading letters they wrote each other while separated. The effect is hypnotic. It’s not quite a narrative, not quite a collage, but something in between, a cinematic poem. The film was commissioned by Fondazione San Marcellino, an organization working with Genoa’s homeless, and Marcello developed it after a chance meeting with Enzo outside a bakery. That casual encounter blossomed into a long collaboration, and what began as a social project turned into something infinitely more personal and artistic. Marcello wrote, directed, and filmed the project himself, with Sara Fgaier providing the editing. The result is a film of quiet, radical empathy, and it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the 2010 Berlinale.
Mary died shortly after the film’s release, and Enzo followed in 2016, after a period of homelessness. Their shared apartment, registered in Mary’s name, could not legally be kept by Enzo, and so he lost not only his partner but the home they had built together. There is something devastating in this final detail, a reminder of how fragile love is under capitalism, how bureaucracies erase even the most sacred bonds. And yet there is also something beautiful, even mythical, in the idea that Mary might still be waiting for him, in some other realm, preparing the space they never got to fully inhabit together. The legacy of La bocca del lupo lies not only in its depiction of a queer romance on the margins, but in how it challenges cinematic norms altogether. It refuses to flatten Mary and Enzo into types. It does not offer easy redemption or cathartic closure. Instead, it offers what few films do: a space to feel. To grieve, to hope, to witness. It’s a love story that exists within a system of violence, prison, transphobia, poverty, but refuses to be defined by it. The love between Mary and Enzo radiates outward, illuminating even the darkest corners of Genoa.
Too often, trans and queer stories are framed by tragedy. But here, the tragedy is not in Mary’s identity or their relationship, it’s in the world that makes surviving love so hard. That Mary and Enzo found each other, held on to each other, and created something real, messy, and profound, is not a tragedy, but a victory. Pietro Marcello understands this. That’s why his film, while melancholic, never feels hopeless. His subjects may be gone, but their love remains: in the footage, in the letters, in the cracks of the city they called home. Watching La bocca del lupo is like stepping into someone else’s dream, full of memory and longing, full of ghosts and tenderness. It’s a rare thing: a documentary that feels like a novel, a portrait that feels like a eulogy, a eulogy that feels like a lullaby. It’s a story of two people who found light in each other’s eyes, even when the world offered only darkness. And in that light, we see something immortal.
Image credits: YouTube
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