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Papa smacks Junior and Junior smacks back, the Jesuit boarding school receives the elite hellion. "Another candidate for the nuthouse." Early on the camera arches from portraits of clerical luminaries on the wall to reveal a classroom rocking with laughter, a mortified instructor sitting in the back while the outside world is seen buzzing through an open window. The students are a rowdy bunch, crowding around a missionary not to hear his warnings about Bolshevism but to take a peek at his mutilated tongue, turning a statue of the Virgin Mary flesh in a reverie during an anti-masturbation sermon. The newest pupil (Yves Beneyton) takes it upon himself to lead the revolt against "the confessors, the exorcists, the spiritual terrorists, those specialists in the fear of God," his main weapon is a blasphemous production of Faust for a dutifully bemused faculty. "What shall we do?" "Clap." Vigo shenanigans vigorously refreshed by Marco Bellocchio, set in 1958 yet infused with a distinctly post-'68 sense of missed revolutionary potential. (The Pope's passing is announced on a TV in the corner of the frame while the youths raucously play ping-pong in the foreground.) The posturing of would-be radicals is patiently endured by the vice-rector (Renato Scarpa), and chuckled at by the working-class servant (Lou Castel). One of the fratelli sleeps in a coffin in an attempt to ease into mortality ("Death is like a medication, it must be taken regularly"), elsewhere the bourgeois harpy (Laura Betti) becomes a reflection on a bullet-cracked mirror. Creeping in a satanic canine costume, taking an axe to the hallowed tree, envisioning a future indistinguishable from sci-fi gobbledygook—agent of change or "adolescent playing superman"? The compliment to If.... is returned in Britannia Hospital. With Piero Vida, Aldo Sassi, Marco Romizi, Amerigo Alberani, Gérard Bucaron, Guerrino Crivello, Edoardo Torricella, Gisella Burinato, and Gianni Schicchi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |