Edipo Re (1967) Reviews

• The really real

  chaos-rampant2013-07-07

  Another marvelous film by Pasolini. No one is as cinematically intense as this man, but it's not an ordinary intensity he affects. It does not result from the withholding of narrative or visual information, it is not primarily a dramatic intensity; Lean, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, all did some terrific work in that external mode where we see the struggling human being in the cleanly revealed world of choices and fates. Pasolini works his way around all that, starting with one of the most archetypal stories. Here we have anticipation, foreknowledge as fate. And of course there is some dramatic intensity in this and others of his films, but that's not what makes him special. He can create heightened worlds that we experience with a real intensity. It goes back to that film movement called Neorealism which thrived in postwar Italy, where the utmost goal was to soak up a more human, more universal conflict as we staggered through broken pieces of the world. Looking back now it seems stale, we have a much more refined sense of what is real, we can see the conceit of the camera. But two filmmakers emerged from out of this movement who did work in a more radical direction, moving the images closer to perception. Antonioni is one of the greatest adventures in film. Pasolini is the other. The larger point with him is to have an intensely spiritual experience of a whole new storyworld, to that effect he selects myths that we have more or less fixed notions about how they should be (this, Medea, his Gospel film) and films them to have invigorating presence in the now. Every artistic choice in the film reflects that; the dresses, the swords, the landscapes, the faces, it's all intensely unusual to what you'd expect from Greek myth, seemingly handcarved to be from a preconscious world outside maps and time. The camera also reflects that; he could have plainly asked of a fixed camera and smooth, fixed traveling shots from his crew, but evidently he wants that warm lull of the human hand. It's a different sort of beauty, not in some painted image but in our placement in evocative space. When Oedipus visits the oracle at Delphii, we do not have sweeping shots of some ornate marble structure as you'd expect in a Hollywood film. A congregation of dustcaked villagers is gathered in a clearing before a group of trees, the oracle is a frightening old crone attended by slender boys in masks. The roads are dusty, interminable ribbons dropped by absent-minded gods. A Berber village in Morocco stands for ancient Thebes. Sudden dances. Silvana Mangano. And those headgear! It's all about extraordinariness in the sense of moving beyond inherited limits of truth. It works. This is a world of divinity, causal belief, and blind seeing into truth that even though it was fated, we discover anew in the sands. The sequence where a feverish Oedipus confronts his father at the crossroads will stay with me for a long time, the running, the sun, the distance where tethers are pulled taut.

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• Autobiographical sensorium

  oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx2011-01-02

  This tale of Oedipus starts off and ends in the twentieth century, though for the most part is set in a primitive version of ancient Greece. There is not much rational connection between the stories, but Pasolini manages to forge himself a free pass on that one. Whilst the Oedipus Complex theme of the first story is meant to be taken quite literally, and is basically autobiographical, the middle story, recognisably Sophoclean, is more, in my opinion, meant to be about an angry confused man who cannot stomach his fate nor confront truths about his identity. As both sections do genuinely feel autobiographical they knit together just fine. The first section of the film set in the 1920s is the best piece of filming I have seen from Pasolini and made me really excited. There's a wide open scene of children running off around a playing field on a hot piercing day, one of those thick childhood days when the emotions battened down the hatches on squire intellect. I was reminded very much of an Edith Sitwell poem (Green Flows the River of Lethe - O): "I stood near the Cities of the Plains / And the young girls were chasing their hearts like the gay butterflies / Over the fields of summer - / O evanescent velvets fluttering your wings / Like winds and butterflies on the Road from Nothing to Nowhere!" The sentiment all the more surprisingly apt given that the second part of the film is shot in what could be the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah (the Cities of the Plains) for all we know. The rage of Oedipus, which occurs frequently in the movie could be liked to another part of the poem: "But in the summer drought / I fled, for I was a Pillar of Fire, I was destruction / Unquenched, incarnate and incarnadine // I was Annihilation / Yet white as the Dead Sea, white as the Cities of the Plains / For I listened to the noontide and my veins / That threatened thunder and the heart of roses." Part of Pasolini's drive for shooting the films seems to be to continue his fascination with ancient buildings and ruins which he demonstrated three years earlier in his superb 1964 documentary The Walls of Sana'a for which he travelled to Yemen. The end of the playing field scene features Jocasta suckling Oedipus. She gazes directly at the camera and thus the audience for a long period, in which she goes through a range of emotions, including what could be arousal, followed by disquiet, which ultimately turns into a distanced understanding. For me this is cinematically equivalent to the Mona Lisa, which is also a gay man's meditation on his mother, greatly cryptic yet provocative, set in against a natural backdrop. Silvana Mangano, who plays the mother in both parts of the movie (and would star in Pasolini's Teorema the following year), carries a lot of it. Her beauty, her alabaster skin and wispy eyebrows, her perfectly tangled plaits (which would send Fuseli to his knees), are commanding. She has an artistic skill that eclipses that of Franco Citti (Oedipus) and Ninetto Davoli (Thebes' crier) quite totally. Franco Citti's lack of skill, whilst occasionally infuriating in the context of the story (his is not the demeanour of a king) do however lend the film a level of authenticity, given the primary motive of this sequence, which was to demonstrate a pained adolescent fury and denial, which was ignorant at its base. There's an unusual device of writing characters' thoughts in black lettering on a white background, which doesn't quite work but which would be far better than the presumable alternative of camera-faced soliloquies. Some of the locations in the movie felt truly dream-like to me, for instance the unkempt walled piazza-garden of Jocasta, the crumbled ruin where Oedipus meets a naked adolescent girl on his peregrinations, the mountainous areas between cities. The props in the movie are cheap and fantastical but quite brilliant, the wind-blown hands on the milestones to Thebes, the quite bizarre head gear of the Pythoness, the soldiers, and King Laius. Modern producers who delight in throwing money at movies, please note how Pasolini achieves far better results with great economy. Cultural references abound, my favourite being the Japanese music, which doesn't seem to have been referenced anywhere (there are no closing credits in the movie), but sounded very much like the Toru Takemitsu scores of Ansatsu (Assasination), Woman in the Dunes, and Harakiri. The story in a strict narrative sense has problems, Citti doesn't convince as any type of king or warrior, giving the appearance of not understanding his lines at some points, and the suicide of Jocasta makes no sense in the wake of her discussions with her son. It is a movie where feeling rather than thinking brings greater rewards.

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• Authenticity is not the issue

  returning2004-10-03

  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

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• Oedipus the Psycho

  aliasanythingyouwant2005-07-09

  Pasolini's Oedipus Rex is a crazy, brutish parade of primitivism, psychosis and weird head-gear - the play as Sophocles himself might've mounted it were he under the influence of some strong hallucinogen. This is one of Pasolini's favorite pastimes, the staging of old literary works as nut-job pageants suffused with a genuine feel for the random craziness of ritual, the sense of people adorning themselves in keeping with impenetrably bizarre superstitious imperatives. The array of outlandish head-wear in this movie would be enough for a museum - three-foot-tall cylindrical gold crowns; helmets composed of curved iron segments dangling from the brim of a saucer-shaped hat; garlands of woven straw worn not horizontally around the skull but vertically ringing the face. Even the Oracle of Delphi gets in on the act, sporting a tall snow-man-shaped pottery-mask-looking contraption with a sprig of vegetation sticking out the top. It's as if ancient life were nothing but one big act of head-wear oneupmanship. The play survives intact despite Pasolini's odd-ball preoccupations. The director's favorite Cro-Magnon thespian, Franco Citti, portrays the hapless Oedipus, while the formidable Silvana Mangano tackles the role of Jocasta, Oedy's self-absorbed mother/wife. The melodrama plays out with all its earth-shaking inevitability, following Oedipus from foundling to patricidal loon to incestuous king to blind wandering fool; Pasolini staging the action so bluntly, so rawly, that we could be watching an ancient performance captured by curious aliens with movie-cameras. The acting as usual is variable. Citti, a physically striking if technically inept actor, creates an Oedipus who seems completely free of snappy psychological accoutrement - an Oedipus who is, quite literally, an over-grown child. As Jocasta, Mangano displays the kind of subtle technical command that Citti utterly lacks, but doesn't have enough scenes to really bring forth a character (Pasolini uses her mostly as an embodiment of overwhelming feminine presence, much as he did Maria Callas in Medea, the companion-piece to Oedipus). There's very little that's subtle about the way Pasolini attacks the central psychological issues of Oedipus, the stuff that has made for one psychiatric treatise after another since the days of Freud. The emotions are splashed all over the screen in typically unrestrained Pasolini fashion. Oedipus is a ranting lunatic; the scene where he kills his father, Laius the King of Thebes, is a homicidal tantrum to make Travis Bickle blush. Citti is not a commanding enough actor to give his scenes any real melodramatic weight, but this doesn't matter given that Pasolini is less interested in melodrama than he is in conveying the idea of psychosis as a kind of universal human condition. This is not Oedipus the grand tragic figure, this is Oedipus the psychopath. There is little in this character that could be described as redeeming - he's a cowardly, childish, mindlessly violent hypocrite. He wears a false beard to show that he's a false king, and after he blinds himself, so he will no longer have to look upon the horrors he himself has been guilty of unleashing, Pasolini transports him to the modern world for a sort of ironic coda that, like the central juxtaposition in his semi-masterpiece Porcile, makes explicit his point about modern humanity's inability to escape its own primal urges. This isn't Intro to Greek Literature Sophocles, it's a mining of Sophocles for the kind of brutishness that turns Pasolini's crank. The question one must ask again is, How the hell does Pasolini get away with it? Why does the kind of material that would seem the stuff of exploitation and rank tastelessness in another director's hand become, in Pasolini's, the stuff of primitive/modern art? There's nothing particularly beautiful in the images, except for the savage beauty of the prehistoric settings. There's almost none of that high-culture flush that symbolists like Fellini and Bergman were able to give their film-buff-coddling "masterpieces." The secret must be in Pasolini's straight-forwardness, his complete lack of moral pretense. He's one of the few directors I can think of who could get away with turning Oedipus into an example of humanity's inherently psychotic nature and still not come across like a high-minded putz. He tears Oedipus Rex down from the realm of stodgy high-culture and re-envisions it as a cry of psychopathic rage, set in a world as inscrutable as the mind.

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• Excellent Film as Art

  DAHLRUSSELL2006-09-25

  This film is possibly the most brilliant - color - film AS ART that I I have ever seen. It combines beautiful and fascinating poetic color visuals, unusual landscapes and locations with the classic story of Oedipus. The story is told with very little dialog, (subtitles for the dialog where present) and this enhances the internal, primal feeling of the piece. Pasolini was often compared to Fellini, but I feel he is much better, because he uses his visuals always to advance and to the purpose of the story. To me Fellini's visuals were often purposeless antic oddity. Here, any ambiguity is not in the story, but in character motivation, which lends modern reality and immediacy to the whole. The acting style combines the classic Greek use of stylized mannerisms and mask work seamlessly with smaller modern film acting. The setting transitions from 1960s Italy to a primitive/tribal landscape which lends itself beautifully to the timeless/ancient feeling of the Greek story. An example of detail: tribal body painting is used to represent both a ritual queen in shades of Elizabeth R, to the whiteness of a plague death; the costume designs are a combination of rustic and Egyptian/Papal religious. Cast mainly with little known actors, the big name actor in this film was international star Alida Valli, who has only two or three brief scenes. Her talent is fairly wasted here, but her presence is riveting as the aging, childless queen. (Valli: A brilliant Italian actress who had a brief career here in the 40s-50s, then returned to Italy/Europe, and balanced her commercial work in slashers with more oddball artistically challenging work. Her work often embodies "excess within control," the dichotomy of superficial clam with seething internal emotion. PARADINE CASE, THE THIRD MAN, THE MIRACLE OF THE BELLS, CASSANDRA CROSSING, EYES WITHOUT A FACE, SENSO, WALK SOFTLY STRANGER.) This film is the kind of work I would hope to be a part of as an actress and artist. This film could easily be in theatres today and be even more appreciated now than it was at the time of its making. Theatrically literate, visually stunning, gutsy, and intelligent. Enjoy!

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