Edipo, el hijo de la fortuna

Oedipus Rex: Oedipus Rex is a haunting experience. The final scene on the city streets is enchanting. The scene in which Oedipus kills three Roman guards is one of the finest tapestries of tension and viscera in cinema. The acting isn't worth mentioning; this film is Pasolini's triumph. It is mainly a triumph of striking and occasionally nauseating imagery. The shifts in time periods are rather tacky and simplistic in retrospect; they are done so gracefully though. The conclusion is pulled together with beautifully written dialogue that only Paolo Pasolini could deliver. The film is not one that is easily forgotten and is sure to be remembered for a long time.

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is adapted well for the foreign screen. Pasolini, better known for the controversial Salo; 120 Days of Sodom, has kept the intensity level to a minimum while still presenting the perverse qualities for which he would be known for. If you don't know the story (like who doesn't) read the play before seeing the movie - there tends to be a shortage on literature freaks these days. Beautifully filmed, Oedipus Rex begins in modern times, continues sometime BC, and finally ends back in the 20th century; thus presenting a sociological thesis for the viewer. The acting is a bit hammy (seeing Oedipus with a mad streak can be over the top) although the characters are developed well and recite their lines as if on stage. My only complaint is the subtitles seem to blend in with the scenery --- white subtitles against a white background. Therefore, this flaw makes it difficult to enjoy some scenes, and Pasolini's poetry is usually superb. Nevertheless, it's still a great film and is worth a look, especially by people with preconceived hatred for Pasolini's later work -and there's definitely a lot out there.

I was very impressed, I really do think that this is a masterpiece! Pasolini used the original text of Sophocles' tragedy, so the story is tightly knotted, which gives the whole film a tangible urgency. There are, apart from the at times stunning amounts of extra's, only two main actors. Silvana Mangano as Giocasta only appears halfway through the movie and has hardly any lines, but she plays her part impressively by her facial expressions and her stature. Franco Citti as Oedipus is the absolute core of the movie, he dominates the screen with his rugged and fascinating face, he laughs and cries and screams, and all the time stays totally convincing as the self-assured ego-tripping hero, who gradually slips into the awareness that his whole life is based on unspeakable crimes and that he is toyed with by the gods and fate. Some reviewers opinioned he acted way over the top, but I assume it was all deliberately so orchestrated by Pasolini, emphasizing the origin of a Greek tragedy that had to be delivered from an open-air rostrum to a distant audience.

The locations are dazzlingly beautiful, Morocco in fact, not Greece, but it works wonderfully well, as do the weird costumes which look like they were sowed and tinkered by the crew or the many locals themselves, but with the amazing effect of something out of a dream (or nightmare). The musical score is extremely subtle, at many times just the soft bleak rhythmic blows of a single drumstick, with an almost haunting effect.

Strangely enough the prologue and epilogue are set in modern times, this doesn't add anything as far as I'm concerned, but as it was it gives us yet some other beautiful images, with the same vast green lawns and waving tree-tops in the opening and closing scene, completing a perfect circle.

Gosh...Pier Paolo Pasolini really hated his father. He would call this his most autobiographical film, but unless he seriously dealt with an Oedipal Complex regarding his mother (which seems doubtful considering his homosexuality, but I'm not a psychologist steeped in the nonsense writings of Sigmund Freud), that autobiographical content seems relegated to the anachronistic bookends of this story of Ancient Greece. Essentially, Pasolini's Oedipus Rex ends up being two films in one: the bookends which directly deal with Pasolini's tumultuous inner life, and the large center, which is a straightforward telling of the story, largely as laid out by Sophocles (though not limited by the Greek rules of drama around place and time).

The opening is set in 1920s Italy with Laius (Luciano Bartoli) as a young Italian military officer whose wife, Jocasta (Silvana Mangano), has given birth to the baby Oedipus. None of these characters are named in the opening, by the way. The antagonism between Laius and Oedipus in this opening isn't about a prophecy of future patricide but out of jealousy over the lost love that Laius feels that Jocasta now directs towards the infant son. When he sends Oedipus off to die, it's done without Jocasta's knowledge, and that's when the film switches time to Ancient Greece (really filmed in Northern Africa) as the King of Thebes' servant takes the young prince into the mountains to die, saved by a servant of King Polybus (Ahmed Blehachmi) whose queen, Merope (Alida Valli), takes him willingly into her home as her own son. Grown up, Oedipus (now played by Franco Citti), is beset by dreams and goes to see the Oracle of Delphi who tells him the prophecy of murdering his father and bedding his mother. Thinking that Polybus and Merope are his real parents, he refuses to go back to Corinth, heading towards Thebes where he meets Laius on the road, killing him and his party, and making it to Thebes where he kills the Sphinx plaguing the city, gaining the right to marry Jocasta.

It's really a straightforward telling of the background of the Oedipal story. The play by Sophocles was limited by the rules of time and place (also action) as laid out by Plato in Poetics, and it's really limited to the twenty-four hour period where Oedipus has to deal with the curse on Thebes, only able to be lifted by the death or exile of the man who killed Laius. It's an investigation done through witness testimony that leads Oedipus to realize his own guilt that seems to obvious on its face but he was unwilling to see because it meant that he would have to give up everything, that he was living a terrible lie, and that the prophecy that he had tried to avoid he had fulfilled in that attempt.

All of that is captured here by Pasolini, though he stretches time and action to happen longer than a mere day with events occurring outside of the immediate vicinity of the court. One of the things that I've grown to really appreciate about Pasolini is his propensity to simply filming outside. It's amazing how much better things can look when you film in front of a thousand year old stone structure rather than stretching a miniscule budget to try and build something approximating it. It's amazing how great a frame can look when one goes outside to take in the countryside with one's subject at the center of it all. It was obvious in The Gospel According to Matthew that Pasolini knew that if he was going to film outside in the country, he was going to take full advantage of it visually, but it's been clear from his first film, Accattone, limited to the confines of Roman streets, that he wanted to bring in more than just his actors into focus. Here, using color for the first time, Pasolini's frame is bursting with detail in pleasing compositions in exotic locales. It's a great looking film.

The investigation plays out without much variation from Sophocles' play. Witnesses are brought in who reveal little bits of information about the murder of Laius on the road, Oedipus refuses to make the logical connections himself, requiring more detail from more witnesses before he can come to accept it himself. Jocasta figures it along with him, taking extreme measures to clear herself of the incestuous situation she's been in for more than a decade, and Oedipus takes his famous last measure to rob himself of sight for what he'd done.

And then the film jumps time again to contemporary Rome where a blind Oedipus (no longer with gouged out eyes, simply blinded some other way) is led around to play his flute by Angelo (Ninetto Davoli), the modern version of the messenger who greeted Oedipus to Thebes. Pasolini repeats something he did in The Hawks and the Sparrows by including some real-world footage, this time of striking workers in Italy, a sight that, while Oedipus can't see it, frightens him.

If we take Pasolini's word that the film is autobiographical, then I think I have to take this final section in a similar way as the finale to The Hawks and the Sparrows, meaning that it's a reflection of a Marxist thinker who sees the world he had wanted to change changing in ways that he didn't expect, leaving his ideology behind (to paraphrase the crow in the previous film). How this actually relates to the story of Oedipus Rex, though, is beyond me, making me feel like the bookends and the actual meat of the film are essentially two different works sandwiched together, Pasolini taking a story with passing direct relation to his own life and using the bookends to make it more self-reflective than the actual story of Oedipus.

I think that contrast is my central issue with the film. I think it's overall a good film, it's just that these three sections clash against each other. The story of Oedipus is well-told with beautiful cinematography. The bookends are interesting regarding the biography of Pasolini (though the opening works better than the ending), but they seem only tangentially related to the actual tale of Oedipus.

So, it's a good film that Pasolini bent towards himself in a way that doesn't mess with the actual story, leaving that largely alone, but framing in a way that's intensely personal, even if it doesn't quite fit. Well, it's certainly better than a bad take.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex is a relatively faithful adaptation of Sophocles' Greek tragedy Oedipus the King. Beginning in 1920's Italy, a baby boy is born and is instantly envied by the displaced father. The setting then changes to ancient times, where a baby boy is being carried out into the desert by a servant to be left out to die from exposure. He is eventually picked up by a shepherd, who takes him back to the King and Queen of Corinth, who adopt the youngster and love him like one of their own. The child grows up to be Edipo (Pasolini's frequent collaborator Franco Citti), an arrogant youth who wishes to see the world for himself. And so he set out on the road to Thebes, the place of his birth.

Plagued by a prophecy that dictates he is destined to murder his father and marry his mother, Edipo is a tortured but intuitive soul. He murders a rich man and his guards after they demand he clear a path for them on the road, and later frees a town from the clutches of a Sphinx by solving its riddle. Staying true to his own recognisable style, Pasolini tells the story of Oedipus not with a sweeping narrative, but through a collection of comedic, violent and often surreal vignettes, the most bizarre and ultimately thrilling being the scene in which Edipo murders the guards. He runs away from them as they chase him, before charging at them one by one and cutting them down. It's a moment without any real motivational insight, offering but a glimpse into Edipo's damaged psyche.

Post-Freud, the story of Oedipus cannot be experienced without reading into the incestuous and patricidal undertones. But these themes are less explored by Pasolini than the idea of Edipo being ultimately responsible for his own downfall. Rather than the inevitability of fate, Edipo creates his own path, committing murder on a whim and marrying while blinded by ambition. For a bulk of the film, Pasolini keeps the audience at arm's length, favouring his own brushes of surrealism over a traditional narrative. While this may be occasionally frustrating - the pre-war scenes than book-end the film seem out of place and confusing - Citti's wide-eyed performance is a fantastic distraction, and the Moroccan scenery helps provide a ghostly, Biblical atmosphere as well as a beautiful backdrop.