Oedipe Roi

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.

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.

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.

We do ourselves no favour by fixating on how well a film uses every little detail and line in an original text. Certainly, by those standards this is a mediocre, and possibly lazy, film at best. But at the same time there is the problem of being so liberal in one's adaptation that every goes sour, the latest attempt at "Vanity Fair" is a perfect example. But this film, along with Bresson's "Pickpocket," should stand as the rules of adaptation for every young director. Both films are very interpretative, but the directors aren't so naive as to think that mere plot details can constitute a film. So what pushes this film beyond a mere surface-level adaptation? In this case, it takes a deep insight into the nature of Greek tragedy itself. Tragedy's dualism (the representational and the chaotic) is prevalent in all Pasolini's works, it was especially essential in his "Gospel," and I was excited to see how it played out in its own source, and the results are absolutely fantastic. Visually imaginative and so intellectually superior to its contemporaries it seems out of place in film.

5 out of 5 - Essential

Pasolini tells the drama of a man who knows his destiny from the beginning but does not accept the awareness of evil, tries to escape an atrocious future, but is inevitably entangled in it. The director uses Oedipus, of a classic archetype, to tell the human condition, the inadequacy of those who know they must die, but are unable to accept it.

The Moroccan setting that hides a fantasy Greece, between desert and villages of shepherds, mountains, cities built with clay and destroyed by plagues, is wonderful. A film written in images, dialogues reduced to the essentials, use of captions as in the silent era, intense photography and - for the first time in a Pasolini film - use of color that renders the ocher chromatism of the desert well.

The film have some substantial flaws, especially the storytelling. But the great Pasolini-style shine's brightly throughout the film and Franco Citti is just amazing as Edipo himself.