Il seme dell'uomo

Marco Ferreri's surreal film "Il seme dell'uomo" ("The Seed of Man" in English) looks more plausible today than it probably did when it first came out. The movie portrays a young man and woman who, after learning of a plague ravaging the populace, take refuge in a house on the coast and turn it into a miniature museum displaying cultural relics from the days before the plague. But that's not the end...

An interesting point is that the movie never identifies what the plague in question is specifically. It could be any scourge. Certainly plenty of bad things have afflicted the planet recently - the combination of global warming and the financial crisis constitutes a perfect storm - to the point that the events portrayed in this movie look as though they could come true. I bet that Marco Ferreri never realized what a prescient movie he was making!

So, I recommend this. Not just as a warning about what the world could turn into, but as a look at Italy's changing cinema in the late '60s (in which Ferreri played a major role). Definitely worth seeing.

I got led to this by "Godard Mon Amour," in which a divide between the dramatized Godard and Anne W. is heightened by her accepting the lead in this film after Ferrari agrees that she won't have to appear nude at all, let alone throughout. (Neither lead does, so either that was an invention of "Mon Amour," or Ferreri radically changed his concept before filming.) Anyway, it's an interesting, rather typical European arthouse experiment of the counterculture era. The leads are a modern Adam & Eve left alone in a well-supplied beach house after they survive a murky apocalyptic incident that apparently kills off most of mankind. (They seem to have survived by driving through a long tunnel when "it" hit.)

But this Eve doesn't want to re-populate the Earth by giving birth in such a bleak environment. The only thing that "happens" after the start is the eventual arrival of Annie Girardot as an older woman a little too eager to fill the sexuality/pregnancy gap with our virile young hero, and whose competitiveness towards the heroine leads toward the movie's one violent act.

"The Seed of Man," which I could only find in Italian without English subtitles (I understand some Italian, but this isn't a movie where the dialogue is terribly important), is typical of many Ferreri films: Striking in concept, middling in execution. It's lively enough considering that not much "happens," and the leads are agreeable, but there are too many scenes of them simply gamboling about, and the bemused, leisurely tenor isn't close enough to either satire or tragedy for the overall sociopolitical commentary to have any great impact. Still, it's a quirky movie from an always-interesting (at least in theory if not always practice) filmmaker, and if like me you get a kick out of such late 60s/early 70s projects that no one in their right mind would have funded at any other moment in time, "Seed" is certainly worth a look.