The Peasants are Revolting

I both do and don’t get along with Pier Paolo Pasolini. Looking at his Trilogy of Life — THE DECAMERON,  THE CANTERBURY TALES, THE ARABIAN NIGHTS  – I don’t think I’d watched all of it before — I found quite a bit of it got up my nose. The not-quite-handheld camera style — “Tighten your fluid head, mate, it’s wobbling amok!” — is a permanent source of irritation to me, though it can work well in some films or some scenes. Here I think it’s meant to add vigour and nervous energy, which really should come from elsewhere. The approach is all over the last film, dominates about half of the first, and is only fitfully present in the middle one (my favourite).

In addition, I’m sometimes doubtful of the selection process: in adapting these three big medieval story-cycles, he’s cherry-picked a small sampling of yarns, and they’re not necessarily the best. ARABIAN NIGHTS in particular seems to leave out nearly all the magic, a shame since PPP is really quite good at magic and myth in THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW and OEDIPUS REX.

And since what’s left are mostly bawdy comedies, isn’t it worth noting that Pasolini’s talent seems both anti-comic and anti-erotic? For all their explicitness, the sex scenes never convince me on a basic anatomical-movement level, and even when the people are attractive, which isn’t always by any means, I never feel any interest in seeing them at it. Quite possibly it would help to be gay, but also possibly PPP is hampered by the fact that all the actual sex is hetero — he seems more sparked by the sidelong glances, often between men and very young boys, scenes which provoke considerable discomfort today (how were they taken back in the 70s?).

Ninetto sings his ever-unpopular “yowling cat theme.”

As for the laughs, the use of accelerated motion to impart Keystone Kops freneticism is usually just embarrassing in any film (I give a pass to Richard Lester, but not to Tony Richardson), and doubly so here, maybe because it feels doubly desperate. Ninetto Davoli’s  Chaplin impersonation in CANTERBURY TALES  is just awful, a would-be homage that actually insults the master by suggesting that enthusiasm is enough to allow you to step into his outsize shoes. If Davoli had been hit in the face with a rotten cabbage at the end, that might have redeemed things though. There are a few laughs, always at unexpected moments, but Pasolini’s timing, framing and view of life doesn’t generally seem conducive to the laughter of surprise, and his performers are a mishmash of skilled and unskilled, seemingly left to their own devices with no attempt at finding a Milos Formanesque harmony between amateur and pro.

I’m also kind of disgusted by Pasolini’s use of grotesques, who are encouraged to display their bad teeth by gurning and laughing for no reason — Fellini seems much more sympathetic to me, and he always gives his caricatures at least the dignity of being effective performers within their scenes, rather than just saying “Stand their with your mouth open so we can see your dental cataclysm.”

But then PPP gives us a shot like this, and I forgive him everything ~

This weird Fayre of Allegories comes at just the right point to rescue THE DECAMERON, adding a sudden gust of the strange and melancholy, and prefiguring the spectacular religious vision that concludes it. Pasolini’s casting of himself as a master painter here, and as Chaucer in CANTERBURY, is also very successful, allowing him to more or less state his own thoughts about his grand project as it unfolds. His absence from THE ARABIAN NIGHTS may well be down to his not looking Arabian enough, but I also interpret it as a sign of his emotional withdrawal from the series.

Franco Citti is an incredibly impressive Devil in THE CANTERBURY TALES.

Common wisdom has it that Pasolini was perturbed by the fact that his films inspired a rash of softcore imitations, and made SALO as a somewhat embittered response. Something that couldn’t be turned to an exploitative use. A friend was fond of claiming that with SALO the filmmaker had “defeated the capitalist mechanism of cinema” by making a film that got banned in most countries and couldn’t be made to generate profit. But if that’s so, didn’t John McTiernan achieve something similar with THE LAST ACTION HERO, a far more expensive movie that not many people wanted to see?

SALO does seem to me a more successful work on some level, though — maybe because the elements of comic grotesquerie are harnessed to a purpose that’s very far from making us laugh. And Pasolini is not a natural clown. (It occurs to me that “Unnatural Clown” would look nifty on a business card.)

One way in which I *do* get on with Pasolini — I love his use of locations. I saw my first PPP film, OEDIPUS REX, right after I’d made my first short as director, a medieval comedy called THE THREE HUNCHBACKS (mine has laughs in it — not enough, but some). It struck me that we’d both been wrestling with the same stuff: staging historical scenes amid crumbling ruins, trying to make them look lived-in and not like monuments, post-dubbing dialogue to avoid intrusive modern sounds (make a period movie and you’ll be amazed how often aeroplanes fly over your head). And, in  my modest short as in his epic Trilogy of Life, we were both attempting to connect with the ribaldry and brutality of another age’s comedy.

Both DECAMERON and CANTERBURY end with spectacular religious visions, including the sight of naughty friars being popped out by a giant red devil in Hell — an image unequalled in Ken Russell or Terry Gilliam’s oeuvres. The tableaux here at times equal Paradjanov’s evocation of Russian icons — for some reason, the art of another era translates more readily to cinematic life than any idea of the naturalistic comings and goings of the people, at least in PPP’s hands.