La cosecha estéril

Bertolucci's debut, based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, shares some qualities of the worlds of both authors and is clearly inscribed in the Italian Neorealism movement. Unfortunately, it occupies a kind of "no man's land" in the filmography of both artists and its non-linear structure is more confusing than interesting. Far from the best from this director.

La commare secca is an interesting film that students of Sixties cinema, particularly Italian, must see. It's neither a forgettable oddity as some say nor a small masterpiece as others do. It is an artifact of Italian cinema, an early example of Bertolucci, and an offshoot of Pasolini. Pasolini provided the "soggetto", the story-theme, and Bertolucci and Pasolini's collaborator and Roman dialect coach Sergio Citti wrote the screenplay, which Bertolucci, terrified and inexperienced at only 21, got so shoot because Pasolini had gone on to make Mamma Roma, but the producers demanded a "Pasolnian" film. (This and much more you'll get from Bertolucci's 2003 interview for the Criterion edition of this film.) But Bertolucci sought to shoot in a very fluid, kinetic style, camera always in motion, to detach his style from Pasolnii's "frontal" imagery influenced by the Tuscan Primitives. Bertolucci had not seen Kurosawa's Rashomon, but may have known of it; anyway everybody calls this a "Rashomon film," including Bertolucci in the interview. The film does go repeatedly over the same period of time (introduced by the start of a heavy rainstorm) as lived by a series of people who were in the park where the crime took place, the murder of a prostitute. They are all suspects or witnesses who are being questioned by an unseen cop at the police station, and what we see are their experiences which often ironically contradict what they have just claimed earlier. They're nearly all liars and thieves and lowlifes of one authentic Roman kind or another.

But here the similarity to Rashomon ends, and the weakness of Bertolucci's film begins. However interesting and in some cases haunting, creepy, and Pasolinian the episodes are, they are not different tellings of the crime story at all. They emerge as a series of shaggy dog stories, because they mostly take us nowhere in solving the crime or describing it. Hence, La commare secca is poorly constructed. The framework does not unify the episodes, nor do they draw us with increasing excitement as Rashomon does to a desire to understand what actually happened. And we don't see events retold differently. The events are mostly unrelated, though paths cross, as in many films, such as Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. Each episode is vivid and interesting in its own way. But they begin to seem so random it's easy to become impatient and bored. Things look up when we get to the soldier, a good-looking rustic with a goofy smile who begins to seem retarded, maybe dangerous. And they look up more with the two teenage boys with their "fiances," who become hysterical with guilt and fear, leading to tragedy. At this point the action seems haunting. But then the final sequences are obvious. We know who the killer is. We just don't know that this act too is connected to an attempted theft -- the connecting thread, perhaps, but not one that's made clear enough, being that everybody's getting in trouble in this park by trying to steal something.

As has been pointed out, some of the non-actors are good but some violently overact, and some of the post-dubbing works but some is shrill and/or out of synch. The fluid camera-work, which Bertolucci claims as his idea, is fun to watch. The film never runs out of kinetic steam. Obviously this is polished work with excellent cinematography by Giovanni Narzisi, editing by Nino Baragli, and music by Piero Piccioni and Carlo Rustichelli contributing to the outward sheen. But the screenplay is the weak point with its lack of a unifying conception. Though Bertolucci uses the word "thriller" in the interview, we never get the feeling till the end that we're on the verge of solving the crime, nor are the string of petty crimes and personal clashes suspenseful or exciting enough to be worthy of the term. La commare secca, despite its fluency and lively action, comes to seem an unsuccessful example of the Italian omnibus films of the Sixties -- one that, unlike the ones with Mastroianni and Loren, or Pasolini's early-Seventies trilogy from Bocaccio, Chaucer, and the 1001 Nights, doesn't quite hold together as a unit. I wonder what Pasolini himself would have done with it.

Anyway, two years later Bertolucci made the semi-autobiographical Before the Revolution, his real first film, emerging as an exciting young European intellectual filmmaker. Pauline Kael called his youth at this time "astonishing" and described this second film as "a sweepingly romantic movie about a young man's rebellion against bourgeois life and his disillusion with Communism." Then would come The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, and Bertolucci would be put on the map once and for all as an important filmmaker, who happily has now (2014) gotten back to work after a decade-long hiatus.

Bertolucci, at one time production assistant of "Accattone" (1961), here makes use of a Pasolini story and does it with that style will be characteristic of this director works. "La commare secca" is simply the death, the death who visits a roman prostitute using the violence of the emargination and disperation. The reconstruction of the facts, through probably inspector voice that interrogates the witnesses, is based on flashback and shows us some people on the border of that time society. Everyone is suspected but only one saw the killer. Very interesting debut by Bernardo Bertolucci, who is able to recreate the right atmosphere e make playing no professional actors letting express their spontaneity and simplicity.

Not very solid, yet coherent work for a directorial debut. Better actors would probably have made a major difference in this Italian Rashomon. The story (Bertolucci and Pasolini) is about what's the truth and what is subjective perception. Who tells what story and why? More important: who hides what and why? Of course this film has nothing to do with the much more enthusiastic 'Rashomon' (Kurosawa, 1950) apart from the matter, but it may at least have been inspired by that masterpiece. If you like the subject you'll like the 'I saw the whole thing'-episode (1962!) from the series 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' too. Finally, this also slightly reminded me of 'Les Mistons' (Truffaut, 1957, short), probably because we are shown some street and environmental scenes of the place where a crime was committed.

Besides Pasolini (Salo, Medea) for the story, I think cinematographer Giovanni Narzisi did the most interesting work on this film. A worthy Bertolucci film and definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

8/10

Bertolucci's director debut has a quite distinctive Neo-Italian modus operandi, utilizing a multi- narrative structure of portraying different groups of people's idle life, who have been involved into a prostitute murder case. The raw-texture of the film is magnificently preserved and the primitive settings are bold enough to impose an intimate analysis upon various Italian people's mind-state at that particular time. At the age of 22, it was a great opportunity for Bertolucci to be granted the permission to work on his master Pasolini's script for his own career inception. Also it's a gutsy manoeuvre for Pasolini to trust his young disciple to fully excavate his talent, which is regretfully a rare case now in the cinema business.

During the park scenes, the film has a distinctively poignant tableaux scenery, but elsewhere the nonchalant idleness of each segmental piece is astonishingly fragmentary and unable to relate it to the core murder case in any rate, the film sacrifices its more audience arresting detective fodder to pursue a random characterization of Bertolucci's own mark although may at odds with his later more prestigious work.

The film's semblance of Akira Kurosawa's Rasho-Mon (1950) is just a bluff, apart from structure-wise design, the film seldom emits a certain commitment of story-telling, nevertheless it has its own charm once it suits to some specific cinema devotees' appetites, but with a horizontal parallel comparison with other 1960s elite peers, Bertolucci is still in his rookie mode and no one should demand too much for a 22-year-old novice to create a groundbreaking director debut, so after all, it is a thin-on-the-ground treasure and deserves a great thumb-up.