"Obscurity" comes up regularly in reviews of it, but Pier Paolo Pasolini's intent is as clear as spring water, namely transpositions of May '68 tumult and a certain film title, All the Fine Young Cannibals. Pierre Clémenti, covered in pelts, scuttles across a dusty, dark-brown landscape which could be lunar until it starts belching volcanic clouds; he gobbles up a butterfly and a snake, a cut reveals four seconds or so of a chalet in another time and place, Clémenti keels over in agony. The manor is in modern-day Germany, inescapably Italianate on the inside: Jean-Pierre Léaud is the stagnant young bourgeois ("even as a revolutionary I conform") who riffs because he's terrified and just wants to fly kites, Anne Wiazemsky is the girlfriend who leads protesters to piss on the Berlin Wall, industrialist father Alberto Lionello yearns for the days of Grosz and Brecht. Clémenti crosses swords with a legionnaire in the primordial past, then munches on his roasted carcass with Franco Citti by his side; Léaud looks like Chaplin to Wiazemsky and like "a mannerist St. Sebastian" to his Ma, he eventually wills himself into a coma in contemporary Berlin, the "Athens of cement." The past is handheld and taciturn, the present is rigidly composed and prolix -- the paralleling narratives suggest conscious and subconscious struggling for wholeness, though the overriding fusion here is a malignant one, a corporate merging between Lionello and war profiteer Ugo Tognazzi, whose combination of the words "Jewish," "commissars," and "Bolshevik" fills the industrialist with merriment. Pasolini's freak-out is rigorously controlled, his political vaudeville is unsurpassable: His merciless punchline is Orwell's in Animal Farm and also Twain's in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, modulated into Buñuel's clarified rhythm. The cannibal chants defiant ecstasy before death ("Ho ucciso mio padre, mangiato carne umana, e tremo di gioia"), the intellectual seeks vitality in the company of pigs, getting devoured for his trouble -- Ninetto Davoli witnesses both, Tognazzi requests the silence of oppression, and, excoriatingly, Pasolini refuses it. With Margarita Lozano, and Marco Ferreri.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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