La pacifista

Antonioni's favorite, Monica Vitti, and Wajda's favorite, Daniel Olbrychski, in the same waste of time, because I cannot call this "The Pacifist" Original title: La pacifista - Smetti di piovere (1970) a film or a cinematographic production. If they agreed to film, I hope they did it for a lot of money, but I doubt it. I hope they filmed without a written script and that this Miklós Jancsó told them along the way what to do. I also doubt this because three names appear as screenwriters, Giovanna Gagliardo (story and screenplay), Guido Leoni (dialogue) and Silvia Silvani (dialogue collaboration). What stupidity of a movie, what huge stupidity, the maximum of idiocy! And this Pierre Clémenti is the most annoying presence on the screen, because I can't call him an actor.

Does it matter if a concept is powerful but damaged in the execution? It probably does. We send things out in the world hoping they work, a broken bowl does not. But, you are going to be a much happier viewer and person, once you realize that nothing around us is really ever finished, merely abandoned in various states of doing and repair.

Artists who consciously strive for perfection only achieve their limits of vision - and conversely limit ours. They may offer an overwhelming sensory experience, surely Kubrick did several times, Coppola once or twice. But that is at the cost of breathing room for the soul.

Antonioni was a master of cultivating from deliberate damage in the story - people went missing, in one striking instance of Blowup, right before our eyes, affairs were not consummated, the mystery was not solved, reality was instead open-ended, elusive, currents of cool transparent air from a window. Inplace of ordinary flow, our eye climbed out through the curtains on a journey of meditation and landscape.

Jancso came to Italy when Antonioni was on his way out, during turbulent times. He decided on a youth film, a 'May of '68' thing. But he does not settle for protest or rebellious paean, though a communist himself and out of the reach of Hungarian censors. He goes to work with Antonioni's leading lady and cinematographer.

He gives us confused , unstable times through a single woman's confused , unstable experience on the streets. She is a journalist, someone ostensibly investigating the 'truth' of stories. The pursuit is for clarity. While reporting on a protest, she is assaulted by youth of some far-right organization and that begins to tear in her sense of reality.

The experience is anxiety and how that perturbs reality and seeing, a subject more deeply of interest to me and one that covers many great works. The most usual way of doing this is by creating hallucination, for example Repulsion.

There is no hallucination here. We move through space as she does, without explanation, going places without clear purpose, meeting people without proper introductions. Narrative seems muddled, but only because it is so in life. Vision is otherwise clean, time is 'real-time'. Light is transparent. Jancso doesn't smother you in stylistic texture, the film glides on air and the passing of time.

Even so 'ordinary reality' can be oblique, the film demonstrates why. It's so cool the way it was envisioned.

The film is almost entirely whispered in voice-over. We try to make sense of shady happenings by following the story she narrates. But her own thoughts intrude. Our eye is tethered to her but now and then floats away as her thought does. And this is how we experience reality, in a continuous mindstream of events and our own running commentary to them. Half of cinema is about this for a reason.

This notion of transparent seeing subject to intrusion extends to the architecture of her house - a pool of open space bared naked by glass doors on all sides, vulnerable to the gaze.

So why does it falter? I think it is a matter of language and having a foreign filmmaker unable to mould the Italian temperament - Italians are not introverts, they keep a lot on the surface. It works in comedy, but you have to mute them for more serious stuff. Antonioni knew just how.

Vitti is our only anchor here, and though a ravishing blonde, she does not give off the impression of being really immersed in her experience. She is acting on her skin - and this is a film about deep commitment, to love, to political dreams, to the recording of truth. The spell is broken.

Still. I think you need to have this at some point. A more powerful viewing would be to note what is retained and what not four years later in Antonioni's Passenger, nominally the most powerful cinema I know (similarly hampered by an actor acting). Notice the one element that is not transferred and how that changes everything.

After the "Battle of Valle Giulia" in the historic year of 1968, the film director Pasolini famously declared that he had more sympathy with the police than the protesting students, as the police were the children of the poor, and the students the children of the middle and upper classes. There is an implied reference to this at the start of La Pacifista, a plea from a generation of radical students who wanted to not be dismissed just because of the privileges of their upbringing.

There are radical groups from the right and the left in the movie. In between them is "La Pacifista", Barbara, played by the glorious Monica Vitti, who just wants to be an earth mother, in love with everyone. A right wing group of youths plan malfeasance against her. They come off as a fairly tribal group, fascinated with ritual, degenerating into a death cult.

I haven't been able to find much written about the movie, it seems that it has been ignored or found confusing (or indeed confused), and the overall impression is generally negative. It's definitely challenging and ambitious, and it feels like you have to go some to suspend disbelief. The movie presents a partially choreographed version of reality, a technique that goes full blown a couple of years later with Janco's Red Psalm; this is very visually appealing, although it's very hard to pin down why it's being done, except that it definitely reinforces the tribal nature of some of what is going on.

The most ambitious technique is to voice the thoughts of some of the characters via narration. It is a lot easier to make actions believable than it is to make thoughts believable. Sometimes I was not exactly clear which character's thoughts were being narrated, due to the tableau focus of some of the camera work. One of the right wing revolutionaries for example seems to have some concerns about his girlfriend being Jewish, or ex girlfriend, and how that conflicts with his ideology, but which one? Much of the movie focuses on Monica Vitti, who portrays a journalist covering the demonstrations. We hear a lot of her character's thoughts. It's difficult to sometimes tell what is going on there, because it often sounds like two characters, and this could be two sides of herself, or it could be that she is having a dialogue with her imagination of her mother or another relative or friend.

The revolutionary events of the movie seem very alien to her, and in fact the movie seems to become quite feminist, because she as a woman is generally ignored or seen as hysterical.

In the end I think the main message of the film is that you can't ignore fascists, you have to fight against them, pacifism is not an option. This seems rather tagged on by the final few scenes of the film, and a rather factional message in this particular case, given how useless and imploding the fascist group seems. Generally it's a very messy film and I can see why it has been dismissed. It is however a good looking and ambitious movie so I give it points for that.

This film from the era of radical youth protests was made in Italy by the great Hungarian director Miklos Jancso. We get a lot of footage of students shouting "Ho Chi Minh! Ho Chi Minh!" A journalist (Monica Vitti) is preparing a story on extremist youth and falls in love with a young radical (Pierre Clementi) who fears being killed by his companions when he is unable to commit a political assassination. Virtually unknown today, the film is a stylish ballet of love and death. It is also excruciatingly dull.

As I'd written in previous reviews for other Jancso' films, I had missed out on an opportunity to watch this one on late-night Italian TV; given that the first edition of the Italian DVD itself is out-of-print and also in view of the fact that I've recently acquired a number of the director's works on disc, I opted to add it to my DVD collection now rather than wait for another broadcast of the film (which, for all I know, might never happen!).

Typically for Jancso', very little was available to me on the printed page except for a succinct entry on Marco Giusti's "Starcult" guide wherein he describes the film as being, "…frightfully enjoyable…ridiculous… exasperating…sincere…(it was) totally rejected at the time". In any case, having now made a fair idea of what the Hungarian director's style is all about (albeit this being his first of four films made in Italy) – plus the fact that I've watched a few of the "Political Revolution" films made in the wake of the famous May 1968 events (of which THE PACIFIST is an example) – I knew more or less what to expect from it. Thankfully, the film is short enough at 83 minutes (and sparked by occasional humor) not to become overly oppressive – since, needless to say, it's rather hard-tack as entertainment: obviously didactic in nature to begin with but also considering Jancso''s customary (i.e. curiously aloof) approach to things!

For marquee value, it features two popular names and faces of the era – Monica Vitti and Pierre Clementi; the latter's characteristic mix of arrogance and earthiness is ideal for this environment (in fact, he had already appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci's similar but even more opaque PARTNER [1968])…but Vitti seems ill-at-ease with the demands of the leading role. She plays a TV reporter who becomes involved with revolutionary-bum Clementi: at first, he seems to be stalking her – and, being afraid, reports him to the police; however, when he's caught and brought before her for identification, she claims it was somebody else! After this, she invites him to live with her but, before long, his companions turn up, admonishing him for having balked from doing his duty (among them is Daniel Olbrychski who, curiously enough, goes uncredited here: for the record, the Polish actor appeared in two other Jancso' films – AGNUS DEI [1970], which I haven't watched, and ROME WANTS ANOTHER CAESAR [1974]). Clementi was supposed to kill a man as a sure sign of his devotion to the 'cause' – and, for failing to deliver on his promise, his former friends offer him a way out by playing at Russian roulette! Vitti leaves intent on setting the law after them but, on arriving at Police Headquarters, the Commissioner takes her for a neurotic!; by then, Clementi has been executed regardless – and, noticing that Olbrychski has followed her there, Vitti shoots him (thus causing a commotion).

I have to say, though, that one of the reasons Vitti's performance feels artificial is due to the fact that her distinctively plaintive voice is inexplicably dubbed on the Alan Young R2 DVD edition I watched! I know that the custom in Italian cinema at the time was to shoot without sound and then recreate the dialogue track later in the studio…but, ironically, Vitti can still be heard on the trailer!! Considering that the print was reportedly culled from the original negative, I wonder whether the 're-dubbing' was done prior to the film's original release – rather than newly re-recorded specifically for the digital format (as had been the case with, say, the Italian DVD I rented not too long ago of Mario Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON [1970]).

For what it's worth, THE PACIFIST is notable for a few inventively-deployed sets (Vitti's home is enveloped by windows as if it were a glass showroom, ditto for a derelict church turned into an impromptu display for the newest fashion in cars) and a score by Giorgio Gaslini which even includes a couple of pop songs – one of these (translating to "Stop Raining"), incidentally, was adopted on its home ground as a subtitle to the film itself.