Les recrues

I bought this movie from Criterion thinking a film accepted by them couldn't lead me astray (only later did I learn Armgageddon and The Rock were part of their collection), and boy was I wrong.

This is really one of the most pointless films I've ever seen. It took a big risk trying with it's innovative non linear structure (ala Rashamon) and gambles like this are usually hit or miss; Rashamon was a hit, this was a miss.

The plot is quite similar to Rashamon in that it's told by four separate accounts of the same event, a murder of a prostitute by a soldier, a pimp and wife, a devious night club worker, and a punk kid who were all near the scene and interrogated as suspects. One of the chief problems though is it is missing characters who actually care or discuss what happened, making it hard for a viewer to relate to what he just saw.

In Rashamon the character's discussion at the beginning and end of the trial as it be validated the themes of that movie, not to mention the hollowed out building they sat in to avoid the rain was the chief visual metaphor of the film. There were constant cuts back to that structure throughout the length of the film.

The Grim Reaper really doesn't have that basis so the cinematography and editing just wander around aimlessly, and I use the word wander because the camera is quite free moving about in this film, apparently thats supposed to be one of the virtues of this film.

Overall the central problem of this film is that it's non linear structure and subjective accounts of the same event generally just don't work unless there are common themes and setting throughout or any way for the audience to relate to what just happened. Normally if a film tells a good linear story with beginning to end plot it doesn't have to be particularly meaningful; this film put itself at risk by trying to be innovative and suffered the consequence.

Bertolucci's director debut has a quite distinctive Neo-Italian modus operandi, utilizing a multi- narrative structure of portraying different groups of people's idle life, who have been involved into a prostitute murder case. The raw-texture of the film is magnificently preserved and the primitive settings are bold enough to impose an intimate analysis upon various Italian people's mind-state at that particular time. At the age of 22, it was a great opportunity for Bertolucci to be granted the permission to work on his master Pasolini's script for his own career inception. Also it's a gutsy manoeuvre for Pasolini to trust his young disciple to fully excavate his talent, which is regretfully a rare case now in the cinema business.

During the park scenes, the film has a distinctively poignant tableaux scenery, but elsewhere the nonchalant idleness of each segmental piece is astonishingly fragmentary and unable to relate it to the core murder case in any rate, the film sacrifices its more audience arresting detective fodder to pursue a random characterization of Bertolucci's own mark although may at odds with his later more prestigious work.

The film's semblance of Akira Kurosawa's Rasho-Mon (1950) is just a bluff, apart from structure-wise design, the film seldom emits a certain commitment of story-telling, nevertheless it has its own charm once it suits to some specific cinema devotees' appetites, but with a horizontal parallel comparison with other 1960s elite peers, Bertolucci is still in his rookie mode and no one should demand too much for a 22-year-old novice to create a groundbreaking director debut, so after all, it is a thin-on-the-ground treasure and deserves a great thumb-up.

Not very solid, yet coherent work for a directorial debut. Better actors would probably have made a major difference in this Italian Rashomon. The story (Bertolucci and Pasolini) is about what's the truth and what is subjective perception. Who tells what story and why? More important: who hides what and why? Of course this film has nothing to do with the much more enthusiastic 'Rashomon' (Kurosawa, 1950) apart from the matter, but it may at least have been inspired by that masterpiece. If you like the subject you'll like the 'I saw the whole thing'-episode (1962!) from the series 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' too. Finally, this also slightly reminded me of 'Les Mistons' (Truffaut, 1957, short), probably because we are shown some street and environmental scenes of the place where a crime was committed.

Besides Pasolini (Salo, Medea) for the story, I think cinematographer Giovanni Narzisi did the most interesting work on this film. A worthy Bertolucci film and definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

8/10

Bertolucci, at one time production assistant of "Accattone" (1961), here makes use of a Pasolini story and does it with that style will be characteristic of this director works. "La commare secca" is simply the death, the death who visits a roman prostitute using the violence of the emargination and disperation. The reconstruction of the facts, through probably inspector voice that interrogates the witnesses, is based on flashback and shows us some people on the border of that time society. Everyone is suspected but only one saw the killer. Very interesting debut by Bernardo Bertolucci, who is able to recreate the right atmosphere e make playing no professional actors letting express their spontaneity and simplicity.

Bertolucci's debut, based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, shares some qualities of the worlds of both authors and is clearly inscribed in the Italian Neorealism movement. Unfortunately, it occupies a kind of "no man's land" in the filmography of both artists and its non-linear structure is more confusing than interesting. Far from the best from this director.