Forever Mary

Director Marco Risi's bizarre Italian take on To Sir With Love stars Michele Placido as Marco Terzi, an overqualified professor who takes a job at the Malaspina, a boy's reformatory school, in Palermo, and gets a typically rude reception. Terzi, a quiet bespectacled handsome man, is immediately confronted by a small class of macho-swaggering, crotch-grabbing boys who think they're men. Over time, Terzi begins to break through the boys' facade to the hurting creatures inside. But then Mary arrives. Mary, a.k.a. Mario (Alessandro Di Sanzo), is a transvestite prostitute who throws the class into taunting titters by day but has to be locked up in a separate cell at night (to prevent the major hanky panky that would take place in the dorm). Eventually Marco is caught in an emotional triangle revolving around Mary's espoused love for him, his growing realization that Malaspina is a sadistic place where education is the least concern, and his compassion for a recidivist kid named Pietro (Claudio Amendola), whose Skinnerian approach to life ("If you're born round, you can't die square") is unacceptable to the idealistic Marco. A raw, yet sensitive, exploration of false male bravura and its underlying vulnerability, Forever Mary is recommended. (R. Pitman)