170 - The Grim Reaper (La Commare Secca), 1962, Italy. Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci.
Bernardo Bertolucci's father was a famous poet.
Bernardo had himself written a book of poems.
So when he directed his first feature film at age 21, he decided "to give myself over to moments of lyricism."
He had worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini as an assistant the year before, on Accatone (1961).
Pasolini told him he wanted to do a lot of close-ups, as in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
Yet his visual reference would be the early Tuscan painters, beginning with Sasseta (Stefano di Giovanni)--a Siennese Renaissance painter who painted altarpieces.
Bertolucci observed that Accatone views everything from the front, like an altarpiece. and that it conveys a sense of the sacred.
Bertolucci considered that Pasolini was not a cinephile, not a film buff, so when Pasolini directed he did not search his memory for examples from before (despite the Dreyer exception) in order to guide him.
Rather, it was as if Pasolini made it up from the beginning.
Bertolucci felt that when working with Pasolini, it was as if he were witnessing the birth of cinema, as if Pasolini were inventing it as he went along.
Pasolini had been writing screenplays for several years and was working steadily. He collaborated on Fellini's The Nights of Cabiria (1957). But Accatone was his first film to direct.
He had written the treatment for The Grim Reaper a few years back but was now focused on directing his next film, Momma Roma (which we will see in a couple days).
Producer Antonio Cervi owned the rights to The Grim Reaper, and he hired two young men to write the screenplay: Sergio Citti and Bernardo Bertolucci.
Cervi asked them to write it the way Pasolini would make it. Citti and Bertolucci did their best to adhere to the kind of script Pasolini would have written.
They "invented the 'Pasolinian' genre."
Then Cervi turned to Bertolucci to direct it.
At 21 he had never been on set before, other than working for Pasolini on Accatone, so he had to show himself as confident and calm when he showed up to lead his veteran crew.
He did consider himself a cinephile, and he did have strong opinions about how he wanted to make movies.
So while he honored Pasolini in the writing of the screenplay, he moved it back towards his own style in the directing of the film.
He wanted his camera always to be in motion.
He wanted to use the camera to write poetry.
He added a leitmotif, a refrain, to each episode of this episodic story.
The premise is a crime. Who killed the prostitute?
The story is the set of interrogations and flashbacks of each of the witnesses. What they say happened versus what really happened. Unreliable or semi-reliable narrators.
The leitmotif is the rain.
In each episode, each flashback, the thunder rolls. The rain comes. We move from the witnesses' experience to the prostitute's house as she is getting ready for the day.
Then we move back.
Much of what we see in the film is not the crime nor its preparation nor its aftermath. Rather we see the events in the lives of the witnesses in the hours before.
A slice of life. An ordinary day.
Bertolucci's book of poems--In Search of Mystery--was published a few weeks before his film premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
It won the award for literary debut.
He was hailed as the "Italian boy wonder."
He would go on to international acclaim for groundbreaking films such as The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), 1900 (1976), Luna (1979), and The Last Emperor (1987), and would continue to make intimate romantic dramas such as Little Buddha (1993), Stealing Beauty (1996), Besieged (1998), and The Dreamers (2003).
* * * * *
The interrogators interrogate five witnesses.
Luciano Canticchia Maialetti ("Canti") tells them he went to look for work.
He says he met with two priests for letters of recommendation and that a third arrived, one of the priest's brothers. They helped him secure a job at a place that is open at night and busy.
But we see him meeting with his compagni, his companions, Nino and Sindaco, to steal the belongings of lovers in the park.
He tells his friends, I feel really mean today. I could make all of Rome's lovers cry.
He leaves alone.
He tells the interrogators, "I think I saw a woman. But she was far away. I didn't really pay attention to her." He also saw three guys.
They ask if he saw a soldier but he says No.
Bustelli tells the interrogators he has given up his life of crime. He paid his debts and now he is clean and should not be implicated. He met his girlfriend in the park to spend time with her. There is no shame in being in love.
We see him meeting her and telling her to wait for him. He gives her some money and tells her to buy a magazine. He needs to go break up with his other girlfriend Esperia.
He goes to Esperia's house. She and her mother are having a terrible fight over him. Apparently, Esperia has spent all her mother's savings on him. The two go collecting money from others. They act like pimps. They fight. They break up. She comes back to him with a knife. He pushes her to the street. He runs away.
He tells the interrogators, "I saw some people, but I wasn't paying attention. There was a woman in the distance and some guys."
Teodoro Consentino is the soldier. He tells them he had come from going to the movies in Rome and was flirting with some pretty girls.
We see him in montage roaming the streets, smiling and singing.
"Let us praise the God of Abraham."
He gets to the park and sits on a bench and falls asleep.
He tells them when he woke up he saw a blond man wearing clogs running with something under his jacket.
The Man in Clogs says he got off work at the club at 6:30 and went through the park for something to do. He saw all the others mentioned above. The package under his arm was a kitten for his girlfriend.
He saw the three guys and says it must be them. He knows them from the club and knows where they live. The light-haired one is Francolicchio, and the dark-haired one is Pipito.
Pipito says they never saw a woman. They met up with two girls.
We see them, hungry, go with the girls to an older girl's house and hang out.
Later they meet a man, the third "guy" at the park, and he tries to lead them into some other kind of trouble. They steal from him and run away.
The next day when the police come to get them for questioning, they run away scared, and Francolicchio jumps in the river and goes downstream. Suddenly, we are in a Flannery O'Connor short story.
After interviewing these five witnesses, the interrogators will go back and interview one of them again. They will decide he is the murderer, and they will go to arrest him.
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