Porcile

"Porcile" is fine if you have the patience and the will to endure its lost and bizarre images or its strange deviate messages. Reactions about it will be mixed, rarely reaching some certainty, but the one that's definitely is that this is one of weakest films ever directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It's too pretentious, looks like his own version of Godard's "Week End" but less brutal, less gross yet more confusing in its speech. Both films deal with world going to its ending, total destruction all around and all hope lost, and Socialism seems to be the good alternative for our better sake. The directors of both films mixed their political speech in the middle of the controversial and shocking images.

Two stories form the whole: 1) one young man (Pierre Clementi) who has killed his parents and ate their flesh walks around from village to village after being sentenced to perish in the vast desert. The only thing he'll be able to do is to kill whoever show up on his way and then eat them too. That's the story of the young cannibal, marvelously presented without words (he only has one spoken line repeated towards the ending). Beautiful cinematography, scary and thrilling sequences in it. 2) this story, very talky and quite messy brings Jean-Pierre Léaud (who was also in "Week End") as the son of an German industrialist who can't connect with people, preferring the company of the pigs ("Porcile" translates to "Pigsty"). He tries some involvement with a girl (Anne Wiazemsky) but with no luck. And there's his father (Alberto Lionello) business deals with a former Nazi of name Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi) also businessman but a rival of his, who hasn't aged through the war years after successful plastic surgeries. Foggy speeches about life, politics, mankind are dissolved into this other story and it's very hard to form a whole idea.

They're apart in time but what they have in common? World going to an end, the destruction and corruption of societies, with everything out of control. Those are recurring themes in Pasolini works ("Teorema", "Salò" just to quote a few) but in here there isn't much going on to make them feel useful for all of us. This is a case that might look better in a book/screenplay/written work than filmed. The experience is distractive, confusing, rarely captivating even with the two known main stars, who had their voices strangely dubbed in Italian (I have my doubts about Pierre, I believe he really learned his lines in the other language). I like the film even though I can't connect with much of what's shown in it. The cannibal story is interesting; the one about the industrialist's son isn't all that much. The final result is chaos. Chaos in this problematic world that doesn't seem to get better. Well, at least in those predictions the master wasn't all that wrong.

Enjoyable but unsustainable for more than one view. 6/10

I thought I was going to be confronted with minor Pasolini here. I was wrong. The same caution applies here though for casual viewers. With Pasolini we come to the foot of a cave where a sage is rumored to live, we can either turn back because there's no ornate ceremony, go back to where we can be told riveting stories about heroes wrestling fate; or sit and listen (not all of it may be intelligible), enter and divine vision.

It opens with young intellectuals in a lush villa ruminating on their exasperations like out of Godard, from the time when revolutions were felt to be afoot. Oh the cause may be worthy in Pasolini's eyes, most likely is; but he makes it a point to show the modern self secluded from it in idle comfort, obsessed with analyzing himself in the scheme of narratives, dissatisfied, full of unrequited cravings and contradictions.

In a separate medieval story we see man as only one more beast of prey alone in the wilderness, reduced to eating a butterfly to stave his insatiable hunger. We see what lurks behind that civilized self that always expects to be pleased, or better, all that had to transpire for endless time in the wilds. It's important here to see both the contrast and the continuity. The cruel nature in man as nature.

And then in a breathtaking scene we're sent scurrying through windswept volcanic rock to see the human beast confronting itself in the crossroads, someone else much like him, alone and wary. There are few scenes more primal than this in cinema.

Back in the modern portion, the same meeting between rivals takes place now with a lot of coy evasion, irony and duplicity, in a palace instead of the wild, over drinks. We see how human structures in place foster collaboration in the end; but it's a corporate one for profit that puts the beast in fine clothes, changes his face even, but leaves the hunger intact.

Pasolini gives us the same barbs about modern life as he has elsewhere, relishing the opportunity, but he's not a sweeping fool; in the medieval portion he makes it a point to show that it's civilized structures, church and army, that go out in the wild to punish wrongdoing, install a semblance of order.

We could be talking for days about what he has woven here. Sin that you control and sin that you don't. Law as necessary civilization. Bartering as control over the narrative (pigsty / WWII in the film). Love that you provide for versus the abstract calling from inmost soul.

So okay, his camera seems sloppy from afar; he wants it to be you who has the chance encounter in these wilds instead of something bled of its reality on a lavish stage, wants it to be primal, madness the gods whisper to you. You'll see near the end some marvelously elliptic narrative as he conjures visions, no accident of sloppiness there; Pasolini is once more anticipating Malick.

And he's aghast at the base nature he sees in him and things, impurity weighs him down; the whole film says, I have these things gnawing inside of me that I'll pay the price for even if I didn't put them there myself. Pasolini at his rawest makes the rocks crack open.

The most riveting thing about it is that we have this seer in the wild of soul, who can bring vision back. He is the one who can't stay for love because something more abstract calls his name. He is the one who strays in the pigsty at nights, who has sinned in the wilds, ate the flesh.

A film by the legendary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, it is above all a Political film, and the filmmaker makes this very clear in his introduction by calling Hitler an "Effeminate Killer", the terminology used here is one of sarcasm and brilliant black humor. , by the way, the whole movie is a joke, it can even be a heavy joke, but here the social criticisms are treated from a unique aspect, where we have the duality of two narrative lines that follow, one about a young man living in a desert who practices cannibalism to feed himself and another of a young man confused with his choices who is the son of a great German industrialist, the point here is to exacerbate that both lines live on the edge of violence and mockery, both lines condemn and suffer punishment for their actions and both at bottom have the same end thought.

Pasolini uses a narrative of contrasting cores, with a core based on text and another in contemplation, when watching the film for the first time it is common to be confused, but on a second look we understand the creative subtleties of pasolini's script, and we understand, above of all the quality of its text and its artistic importance, "Sty" is not a "heavy" film as many claim, it is a film that works entirely on sarcastic metaphors of social criticism. The direction is consistent, with a camera that fluctuates a lot of visual styles between the two cores of the plot and manages to, in a way, even expose Paolini's versatility, one of the great problems of the film for me are two, without fishing the political references, the narrative by itself does not stand, it is necessary to understand this allegory first, and second is that I would like to feel a little more the viscerality of the characters' actions, as Pasolini himself did in some of his future features. 8/10.

So instead of having a party and drinking and such, I thought I'd see in the new year by watching two offerings from Pasolini, Le Mura di Sana / The Walls of Sana'a (1964) and Porcile (1969).

There are DVD versions out there which have scenes from Porcile in the wrong order, so, at the time of writing, if you want to see Porcile properly you have to have the Region 2 UK Tartan Pasolini box-set.

Porcile, I will say, is a great film. There are two stories that are played alongside each other. Pierre Clémenti is a... well... who knows, a sprite perhaps, in a barbarous medieval setting. It's clear Pasolini has chosen him because he has a hard-on for him, he looks like he's come straight out of a Caravaggio painting. Our sprite and some buddies run around the black slopes of Etna being mad, it's very entertaining, and almost wordless. You can't really believe what you're seeing, it appears that Etna is actually active when they're on it, there is black smoke spewing forth, and the actors run past the most awesomely evil sulphurous cave you've ever seen. So you get to see some fornication, cannibalism, volcanism, and our sprite throwing a human head into the aforementioned evil hole. It's the most purely primal thing I've ever seen, and I've watched Matthew Barney films.

The other half of the movie is set in an Italianate villa in Germany, it concerns on the one hand Mr Klotz and Mr Herdhitze, two industrialists vying with each other for superiority, and on the other hand Julian (playde by Jean-Pierre Léaud), Herr Klotz's son. Julian is portrayed as withdrawing from the human race almost entirely, this is shown to be down to his parents, who self-describe themselves as the type of people who would be painted as pigs by George Grosz, an elitist, although entirely accurate and most wondrous piece of scriptwriting. Julian has no concept of the joy of living or of functional human relationships at all, and so this child of the rich takes to copulating with pigs. Who can blame him as he has only the example of his parents' ruinous and obscure preoccupations, specifically the pursuit of wealth. At one point Julian describes a dream where he walks along a road searching for something at night, the road is filled with shining puddles, and then a little piglet comes a long and playfully bites four of his fingers off, and it doesn't hurt, they come off, as if they were made of rubber. At one point Julian's mother and his girlfriend stand opposite one another describing him, as if he were two completely separate people. And yet he's both. This shows how ideology and prejudice only allow you to see someone, as if through murky water.

Pasolini's drama possess a strong sense of both, humor and commentary, told in the particular way only the director could be capable of, with great poetic-like dialogue, and strong-thought-provoking themes all over the two stories presented, about cannibalism and human relationships, and while the whole flick could be hardly digestible for most audiences, for the small-but-self-aware section that won't mind the twisted-raw depictions over the director's ideologies, this will represent quite the experience.