Porcile

This is one of the strangest works of Italian writer-director Pier Paolo Pasolini. It interweaves two story lines: The first, almost dialogue- free, tale takes place in an unknown volcanic landscape at an unspecified historical period and involves a young cannibal who leads a band that rapes and murders the local populace. The second tale is set in 1967 Germany and involves the son of a wealthy industrialist who is used as a pawn in a power game between his father and a business rival.

It's well-made with several striking images, but it is very slow, very obscure and challenging. It is a bleakly savage satire on human nature, which will certainly not appeal to everyone. In fact it's a film that is easy to admire, but hard to like.

It is certainly a powerful work of art, but certainly don't expect to enjoy it.

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.

With this, I only have one more Pasolini feature to go and I have seen all of them (the missing culprit being Accatone). Porcile does not represent Pasolini at his best. It's far too abstract and obscure. Two stories alternate, one taking place in a quasi-legendary time and one in modern times. The quasi-legendary scenes concern a young cannibal, some rapists and murderers. The modern sequence concerns some former Nazis living in Italy. One of their sons, played by French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, is sick of the evil, bourgeois lifestyle he leads. At one point, since he lacks any ambition, he throws himself into an intentional coma. I don't get it, especially how the two parts work together. Still, as a Pasolini fan, I have to admit that it is a strikingly made film. I especially liked the scenes set in the past. Pasolini regulars Franco Citti and Ninetto Davoli (the only actor, I believe, who appears in both parts of the film, although I have no clue why) come along for the ride. Pasolini fans should certainly see it, others should avoid. 7/10.

This movie is a testament to the power of poetry and its capacity to dwarf the medium of cinema. Pasolini merges the rites of passage towards 'bildung', {German concept for the development of civilizing Culture}, using five separate themes; - the immature rapport between a wealthy, young bourgeois couple, {named Julian and Ida}, the dilemma of Julian's parents, who desire the union, {it would be materially beneficial}, and the contrasting styles of two German plutocrats, - all this Pasolini combines and contrasts with the historical Italian vagabond life of a countryside bandit , circa the early 1500's, armed with a musket, roving the barren hilly escarpment in the Pompeian district and preying on unarmed, vulnerable Christian pilgrims on their way to Rome.

Julian and Ida play at being in love - but their inexperience leads them to compromise reality with their love of words. Julian is a spoilt young man who has been infantilized by his doting mother, who in her ensuing dialogue with Ida reveals herself to be totally blind to her son's character, believing instead that Julian has all the laudable attributes of a good German.

The narrative flow concerning this German family, shot as an interior with much opulence, antique furniture and Renaissance paintings, in enormous palatial rooms, which as the story moves forward, is intercut with desolate scenic waste as the vagabond displays primitive savagery, in killing, dismembering and cannibalizing his victims. These scenes are in a landscape that is evocatively lyrical and empty of civilization {that is apart from the hymns which are beautifully chanted by the pilgrims on their way to destruction}.

In a parody of Godard and Truffaut, it soon becomes obvious that the love of the two 'pretty young things' is doomed to fail {as the barrier that they set up between each other with meaningless words becomes insurmountable}. The movie now shifts into its essential focus. The two plutocrats, the one, being Julian's father Herr Klotz, a German word for 'idiot' or blockhead, and the other, Herr Herdhitze, meaning 'hot fire' {possibly a reference to the exterminating ovens}, square up as two contrasting sides of the German psyche. Klotz, a humanist, is a cultivated man with a sense of cynicism and an appreciation of the accurate satirical art works of George Grosz - he sees himself depicted by Grosz sitting in a café with a sexy young secretary on his lap, cigar in his mouth and a piggish face - he also refers to Brecht's championship of the workers. Herdhitze, a technocrat, on the other hand, refers to himself as a man of science, who despises individuality, and wants to convert all the impoverished farmers to technicians - he has no soul at all.

The two men face off with the core of the German problem - their love of the meat of the pig. Their dialogue .... Klotz - 'the Germans love their sausage' to which Herdhitze replies 'shit' Klotz 'but they do defecate a lot'. The ironic impasse between the two Nazis is whether Jews are pigs or not - with the added Surreal contradiction of, if the Jews are pigs why do the Germans love their pork. and why do they grunt like pigs?

The year is 1959, in the German quest for an economic miracle, questions of Jews and culture are easily overcome, and the two plutocrats combine forces, in the pursuit of their worship of material wealth. Meanwhile Julian has resolved his confusion, and sacrifices himself to the totem of the pig, by going to the German Temple - the Pigsty - and there offers himself as an anointed meal to the pigs

Pasolini has wrought a great work of Art that might have been an Epic Poem or a great novel or a great Painting like Picasso's 'Guernica' or Goya's 'Atrocities of War'. He certainly has no sympathy whatsoever for the Nazi German and his god 'The Pig'.

This is a difficult movie to digest, but it's rationale is crystal clear. If you are interested in the History of the Intellect, then this movie is unmissable.

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.