The Piaggio Ape is a unique vehicle with a one-of-a-kind design – it encapsulates the history of the country that created it and the era that shaped it. Sting Like a Bee uses this vehicle, one of the most iconic objects of the 1900s Italy, as a lens to narrate something unexpected, portraying real people and how the Piaggio Ape impacts their lives. It’s not – as one might expect – a working-class tale, about work and men and women who use the Piaggio Ape to deliver or transport goods, but a story about young people, their lives, desires, sexuality, and aspirations. Much like the Lambretta was for the Mods, the Piaggio Ape becomes a status symbol – a fetishized object of the subculture barely aware of itself and so niche that only affect people in a marginal way.
The documentary’s director, Leone Balduzzi, organized, managed, and moved a series of teenagers from the Italian province as if they were professional actors in a staged production. In Sting Like a Bee, the goal is to craft a faux movie as a tool to document their lives, question their choices, and unveil their lives, desires, and aspirations. Easier to watch than explain, the movie revolves around the Ape, a vehicle to be personalized, modified, and transformed into a status symbol. And this seditious use of the Piaggio Ape, contrary to the intentions it was put on the market, portrays the essence of power and design.
The best design is not that that serves a single purpose or provides a specific function, but that that withstand eras and social changes while taking up new roles and uses. Released in 1948, during Italy’s post-war reconstruction, and only taking its familiar shape in 1956, the Piaggio Ape can still be seen everywhere, even exported to India where it’s used as a rickshaw and produced in different versions and models. In Sting Like a Bee, the Ape embodies a bridge between local traditions and working-class roots and the modern aspirations of the teenagers who buy it and modify it. The small Italian town's Ape-culture, which is very much limited, transforms the vehicle without fundamentally altering its design –it remains the same, despite the new colors and the racing setups; its distinctive industrial design adapted to the light life, the romantic escapades, and escapades.
Nothing could better represent such an overturning of this vehicle's initial concept than girls being attracted to guys because they see them in a Piaggio Ape, which is now a symbol of coolness on par with convertible sports cars. The Ape, with its distinct shape, carries the legacy of rural Italy and an era of small-scale industrialization rooted in workshop craftsmanship. Before the advent of modern vans, yet smaller than trucks, the Ape represented a form of entrepreneurial production: a single-seater with just enough space for goods and little else.
The best design is not that that serves a single purpose or provides a specific function, but that that withstand eras and social changes while taking up new roles and uses.
Despite its many limitations and a bit of overreach when talking about sex – such as the metaphor comparing young people exploring sexuality to bees pollinating flowers in a vehicle named Ape (Italian for “bee”) – Sting Like a Bee successfully brings to the theaters a story that revolves around the concept of aesthetics. The rural images of the roads traversed by these Apes become symbolic, reflecting the personalities of the characters and the social changes they navigate. The juxtaposition of something very fast-paced – like young people’s subcultures – and something incredibly slow-paced – like using something antiquated – of something aspirational – like trying to appear cool – and something that keeps them grounded – like using an economical, working-class vehicle – invited viewers to understand people through what the hope the design object can do for them.
The documentary has a distinctly photographic quality, almost like a visual chronicle of provincial Italy. It captures people by grounding them in the spaces that define them: boys in garages surrounded by tools, couples in living rooms with lace-trimmed shelves, parents in the kitchen, and so on. At times, it feels like a moving version of a grand photographic reportage on “deep Italy,” a place where social changes have an impact, a place that is unable to keep up with the trends seen on TV or smartphones but eager to reinterpret in a uniquely local way both trends and youth rebellion. And it does so through the reuse of a small industrial vehicle!
There is no doubt that the documentary takes a completely patronizing perspective. All the young characters are look at, narrated, and scrutinized as a parent would, with their same good-nature, but without truly engaging with them on their level, without ever getting involved in their squabbles, the rivalries and hatred, without judging – as young people do – but by simply admiring the way they live their young age. And with more than a hint of nostalgia for that time of life and the simplicity it represents to the adult eye, which is part and parcel of what an iconic design object embodies – the telling of our story.