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Sophocles, split across three epochs and two continents as a chimera of mythology, psychosis, and autobiography. Thebes at the start is a Bolognese villa in the 1920s, perhaps the one where Pier Paolo Pasolini was born. Jocasta (Silvana Mangano) in the meadow breastfeeding her infant is practically a Fra Filippo figure, she smiles for the camera until a dark thought crosses her mind, Laius (Luciano Bartoli) in fascist military uniform scowls at the baby pram. (A silent-film intertitle: "You are here to take my place, send me into the void, and rob me of all that I have.") Fireworks at night and suddenly it's ancient times in the Moroccan desert. The executioner shows pity, the baby is adopted by the rulers of Corinth (Alida Valli and Ahmed Belhachmi) and grows up into Franco Citti's hotheaded Oedipus. The prophecy is staged under a vast Argan tree and scored to the Oracle's cackling, the roadside clash with Laius and his guards is a series of fierce, draining slashes painted with blasting sunlight. The Sphinx is a spindly fellow engulfed by a gigantic shamanic mask, quelled not by the protagonist's cleverness but by his thuggish force. "The abyss into which you thrust me is inside you." Feverish chanting and handheld panning shots inform Pasolini's jangling, blunt pageantry, filled to the brim with mysterious splendor. (Mangano's half-prima donna, half-kabuki queen, flute-playing on the steps of a cathedral distorted by Wellesian ground-level lenses.) Fall of the figlio della fortuna, the words of Tiresias (Julian Beck) ignored, the illumination that blinds. A rough draft for Porcile and a companion piece to Medea, with a prologue that parachutes the blinded lunkhead onto the industrial landscape of 1967, his childhood home is now just another crumbling edifice in modern Italy. With Carmelo Bene, Francesco Leonetti, and Ninetto Davoli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |