Pier Paolo Pasolini

  • Mamma Roma (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) You have to have a strong stomach to tolerate much of the Italian neo-realist movement, as even spiritual successor Mamma Roma (released a decade after the acknowledged end of the period) will certify. It starts, hopefully enough, with a middle-aged woman (the captivating Anna Magnani) boisterously attending a marriage ceremony. It doubles as a farewell for her, as she leaves her village with her teenage son and sets out for Rome, where her savings from years of prostitution have enabled her to rent a decent apartment and start a fruit-selling business. But there’s her son to contend with: a wannabe thug, easily lured by the distractions offered by the big city. Things get worse once a man with knowledge of her previous occupation tracks her down and blackmails her. Things get even worse once the son gets in trouble with the law and then… well, it’s not a happy ending. Writer-director Pier Paolo Pasolini isn’t interested in rewarding the virtuous as much as inflicting as much pain as he can on our likable protagonist, to the point where the entire feels pointless—it ends not just on a downer, but a refusal to answer even the more elementary, “And then what?”  While this really isn’t my kind of cinema, I don’t completely hate the results largely due to Magnani’s performance and the unromanticized portrayal of Roma on the cusp of La Dolce Vita. The city portrayed here feels far closer to the post-WW2 reconstruction years than the sweet portrait shown by Hollywood-on-the-Tiber and other Italian filmmakers with an optimistic spirit. But that’s what you get once you start digging into Italian neorealism—it’s even in the name!

  • Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

    Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2019) As far as I’m aware, Salò is one of the rare films to straddle the line between pornography, gory horror, social statement and arthouse cinema. Among other distinctions, it has been banned from a few countries for decades, features copious full-frontal male nudity, updates a Marquis de Sade story for the Italian fascist regime of WW2 and is featured in the prestigious Criterion collection. Oh, and: the film’s most noteworthy scene involves a lengthy, unflinching and self-indulgent sequence of coprophagy—not once, but twice. The result is a film both repulsive and provocative, with writer-director Pier Paolo Pasolini using perversions of all kinds (far exceeding even most perverts’ limits) to illustrate the depraved ideology of fascism pushed to its conclusion. Despite the nudity, sadomasochism and scatophilia, Salò somehow doesn’t quite come across as an exploitation film—nearly everything here is not meant to titillate as much as to make audiences deeply uncomfortable for the entire duration of the film. On the other hand, many viewers won’t make it to the end, and most people who see the film once will never make it to a second viewing. (This being said, and this is not a favourable comment on our times or my own jadedness, Salò is definitely disturbing but somehow not quite as graphically violent as many other horror movies.)  I’ve seen it only because it is of some historical importance (its Wikipedia page is a wild read), but got no enjoyment out of it—now that I’ve seen it, I’m quite happy to never revisit it.