Oedipe Roi

Another marvelous film by Pasolini.

No one is as cinematically intense as this man, but it's not an ordinary intensity he affects. It does not result from the withholding of narrative or visual information, it is not primarily a dramatic intensity; Lean, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, all did some terrific work in that external mode where we see the struggling human being in the cleanly revealed world of choices and fates.

Pasolini works his way around all that, starting with one of the most archetypal stories. Here we have anticipation, foreknowledge as fate. And of course there is some dramatic intensity in this and others of his films, but that's not what makes him special. He can create heightened worlds that we experience with a real intensity. It goes back to that film movement called Neorealism which thrived in postwar Italy, where the utmost goal was to soak up a more human, more universal conflict as we staggered through broken pieces of the world.

Looking back now it seems stale, we have a much more refined sense of what is real, we can see the conceit of the camera. But two filmmakers emerged from out of this movement who did work in a more radical direction, moving the images closer to perception.

Antonioni is one of the greatest adventures in film. Pasolini is the other. The larger point with him is to have an intensely spiritual experience of a whole new storyworld, to that effect he selects myths that we have more or less fixed notions about how they should be (this, Medea, his Gospel film) and films them to have invigorating presence in the now.

Every artistic choice in the film reflects that; the dresses, the swords, the landscapes, the faces, it's all intensely unusual to what you'd expect from Greek myth, seemingly handcarved to be from a preconscious world outside maps and time. The camera also reflects that; he could have plainly asked of a fixed camera and smooth, fixed traveling shots from his crew, but evidently he wants that warm lull of the human hand. It's a different sort of beauty, not in some painted image but in our placement in evocative space.

When Oedipus visits the oracle at Delphii, we do not have sweeping shots of some ornate marble structure as you'd expect in a Hollywood film. A congregation of dustcaked villagers is gathered in a clearing before a group of trees, the oracle is a frightening old crone attended by slender boys in masks. The roads are dusty, interminable ribbons dropped by absent-minded gods. A Berber village in Morocco stands for ancient Thebes. Sudden dances. Silvana Mangano. And those headgear! It's all about extraordinariness in the sense of moving beyond inherited limits of truth.

It works. This is a world of divinity, causal belief, and blind seeing into truth that even though it was fated, we discover anew in the sands.

The sequence where a feverish Oedipus confronts his father at the crossroads will stay with me for a long time, the running, the sun, the distance where tethers are pulled taut.

Gosh...Pier Paolo Pasolini really hated his father. He would call this his most autobiographical film, but unless he seriously dealt with an Oedipal Complex regarding his mother (which seems doubtful considering his homosexuality, but I'm not a psychologist steeped in the nonsense writings of Sigmund Freud), that autobiographical content seems relegated to the anachronistic bookends of this story of Ancient Greece. Essentially, Pasolini's Oedipus Rex ends up being two films in one: the bookends which directly deal with Pasolini's tumultuous inner life, and the large center, which is a straightforward telling of the story, largely as laid out by Sophocles (though not limited by the Greek rules of drama around place and time).

The opening is set in 1920s Italy with Laius (Luciano Bartoli) as a young Italian military officer whose wife, Jocasta (Silvana Mangano), has given birth to the baby Oedipus. None of these characters are named in the opening, by the way. The antagonism between Laius and Oedipus in this opening isn't about a prophecy of future patricide but out of jealousy over the lost love that Laius feels that Jocasta now directs towards the infant son. When he sends Oedipus off to die, it's done without Jocasta's knowledge, and that's when the film switches time to Ancient Greece (really filmed in Northern Africa) as the King of Thebes' servant takes the young prince into the mountains to die, saved by a servant of King Polybus (Ahmed Blehachmi) whose queen, Merope (Alida Valli), takes him willingly into her home as her own son. Grown up, Oedipus (now played by Franco Citti), is beset by dreams and goes to see the Oracle of Delphi who tells him the prophecy of murdering his father and bedding his mother. Thinking that Polybus and Merope are his real parents, he refuses to go back to Corinth, heading towards Thebes where he meets Laius on the road, killing him and his party, and making it to Thebes where he kills the Sphinx plaguing the city, gaining the right to marry Jocasta.

It's really a straightforward telling of the background of the Oedipal story. The play by Sophocles was limited by the rules of time and place (also action) as laid out by Plato in Poetics, and it's really limited to the twenty-four hour period where Oedipus has to deal with the curse on Thebes, only able to be lifted by the death or exile of the man who killed Laius. It's an investigation done through witness testimony that leads Oedipus to realize his own guilt that seems to obvious on its face but he was unwilling to see because it meant that he would have to give up everything, that he was living a terrible lie, and that the prophecy that he had tried to avoid he had fulfilled in that attempt.

All of that is captured here by Pasolini, though he stretches time and action to happen longer than a mere day with events occurring outside of the immediate vicinity of the court. One of the things that I've grown to really appreciate about Pasolini is his propensity to simply filming outside. It's amazing how much better things can look when you film in front of a thousand year old stone structure rather than stretching a miniscule budget to try and build something approximating it. It's amazing how great a frame can look when one goes outside to take in the countryside with one's subject at the center of it all. It was obvious in The Gospel According to Matthew that Pasolini knew that if he was going to film outside in the country, he was going to take full advantage of it visually, but it's been clear from his first film, Accattone, limited to the confines of Roman streets, that he wanted to bring in more than just his actors into focus. Here, using color for the first time, Pasolini's frame is bursting with detail in pleasing compositions in exotic locales. It's a great looking film.

The investigation plays out without much variation from Sophocles' play. Witnesses are brought in who reveal little bits of information about the murder of Laius on the road, Oedipus refuses to make the logical connections himself, requiring more detail from more witnesses before he can come to accept it himself. Jocasta figures it along with him, taking extreme measures to clear herself of the incestuous situation she's been in for more than a decade, and Oedipus takes his famous last measure to rob himself of sight for what he'd done.

And then the film jumps time again to contemporary Rome where a blind Oedipus (no longer with gouged out eyes, simply blinded some other way) is led around to play his flute by Angelo (Ninetto Davoli), the modern version of the messenger who greeted Oedipus to Thebes. Pasolini repeats something he did in The Hawks and the Sparrows by including some real-world footage, this time of striking workers in Italy, a sight that, while Oedipus can't see it, frightens him.

If we take Pasolini's word that the film is autobiographical, then I think I have to take this final section in a similar way as the finale to The Hawks and the Sparrows, meaning that it's a reflection of a Marxist thinker who sees the world he had wanted to change changing in ways that he didn't expect, leaving his ideology behind (to paraphrase the crow in the previous film). How this actually relates to the story of Oedipus Rex, though, is beyond me, making me feel like the bookends and the actual meat of the film are essentially two different works sandwiched together, Pasolini taking a story with passing direct relation to his own life and using the bookends to make it more self-reflective than the actual story of Oedipus.

I think that contrast is my central issue with the film. I think it's overall a good film, it's just that these three sections clash against each other. The story of Oedipus is well-told with beautiful cinematography. The bookends are interesting regarding the biography of Pasolini (though the opening works better than the ending), but they seem only tangentially related to the actual tale of Oedipus.

So, it's a good film that Pasolini bent towards himself in a way that doesn't mess with the actual story, leaving that largely alone, but framing in a way that's intensely personal, even if it doesn't quite fit. Well, it's certainly better than a bad take.

Oedipus Rex: Oedipus Rex is a haunting experience. The final scene on the city streets is enchanting. The scene in which Oedipus kills three Roman guards is one of the finest tapestries of tension and viscera in cinema. The acting isn't worth mentioning; this film is Pasolini's triumph. It is mainly a triumph of striking and occasionally nauseating imagery. The shifts in time periods are rather tacky and simplistic in retrospect; they are done so gracefully though. The conclusion is pulled together with beautifully written dialogue that only Paolo Pasolini could deliver. The film is not one that is easily forgotten and is sure to be remembered for a long time.

This tale of Oedipus starts off and ends in the twentieth century, though for the most part is set in a primitive version of ancient Greece. There is not much rational connection between the stories, but Pasolini manages to forge himself a free pass on that one. Whilst the Oedipus Complex theme of the first story is meant to be taken quite literally, and is basically autobiographical, the middle story, recognisably Sophoclean, is more, in my opinion, meant to be about an angry confused man who cannot stomach his fate nor confront truths about his identity. As both sections do genuinely feel autobiographical they knit together just fine.

The first section of the film set in the 1920s is the best piece of filming I have seen from Pasolini and made me really excited. There's a wide open scene of children running off around a playing field on a hot piercing day, one of those thick childhood days when the emotions battened down the hatches on squire intellect. I was reminded very much of an Edith Sitwell poem (Green Flows the River of Lethe - O):

"I stood near the Cities of the Plains / And the young girls were chasing their hearts like the gay butterflies / Over the fields of summer - / O evanescent velvets fluttering your wings / Like winds and butterflies on the Road from Nothing to Nowhere!"

The sentiment all the more surprisingly apt given that the second part of the film is shot in what could be the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah (the Cities of the Plains) for all we know.

The rage of Oedipus, which occurs frequently in the movie could be liked to another part of the poem:

"But in the summer drought / I fled, for I was a Pillar of Fire, I was destruction / Unquenched, incarnate and incarnadine // I was Annihilation / Yet white as the Dead Sea, white as the Cities of the Plains / For I listened to the noontide and my veins / That threatened thunder and the heart of roses."

Part of Pasolini's drive for shooting the films seems to be to continue his fascination with ancient buildings and ruins which he demonstrated three years earlier in his superb 1964 documentary The Walls of Sana'a for which he travelled to Yemen.

The end of the playing field scene features Jocasta suckling Oedipus. She gazes directly at the camera and thus the audience for a long period, in which she goes through a range of emotions, including what could be arousal, followed by disquiet, which ultimately turns into a distanced understanding. For me this is cinematically equivalent to the Mona Lisa, which is also a gay man's meditation on his mother, greatly cryptic yet provocative, set in against a natural backdrop.

Silvana Mangano, who plays the mother in both parts of the movie (and would star in Pasolini's Teorema the following year), carries a lot of it. Her beauty, her alabaster skin and wispy eyebrows, her perfectly tangled plaits (which would send Fuseli to his knees), are commanding. She has an artistic skill that eclipses that of Franco Citti (Oedipus) and Ninetto Davoli (Thebes' crier) quite totally. Franco Citti's lack of skill, whilst occasionally infuriating in the context of the story (his is not the demeanour of a king) do however lend the film a level of authenticity, given the primary motive of this sequence, which was to demonstrate a pained adolescent fury and denial, which was ignorant at its base.

There's an unusual device of writing characters' thoughts in black lettering on a white background, which doesn't quite work but which would be far better than the presumable alternative of camera-faced soliloquies.

Some of the locations in the movie felt truly dream-like to me, for instance the unkempt walled piazza-garden of Jocasta, the crumbled ruin where Oedipus meets a naked adolescent girl on his peregrinations, the mountainous areas between cities.

The props in the movie are cheap and fantastical but quite brilliant, the wind-blown hands on the milestones to Thebes, the quite bizarre head gear of the Pythoness, the soldiers, and King Laius. Modern producers who delight in throwing money at movies, please note how Pasolini achieves far better results with great economy.

Cultural references abound, my favourite being the Japanese music, which doesn't seem to have been referenced anywhere (there are no closing credits in the movie), but sounded very much like the Toru Takemitsu scores of Ansatsu (Assasination), Woman in the Dunes, and Harakiri.

The story in a strict narrative sense has problems, Citti doesn't convince as any type of king or warrior, giving the appearance of not understanding his lines at some points, and the suicide of Jocasta makes no sense in the wake of her discussions with her son. It is a movie where feeling rather than thinking brings greater rewards.

I was very impressed, I really do think that this is a masterpiece! Pasolini used the original text of Sophocles' tragedy, so the story is tightly knotted, which gives the whole film a tangible urgency. There are, apart from the at times stunning amounts of extra's, only two main actors. Silvana Mangano as Giocasta only appears halfway through the movie and has hardly any lines, but she plays her part impressively by her facial expressions and her stature. Franco Citti as Oedipus is the absolute core of the movie, he dominates the screen with his rugged and fascinating face, he laughs and cries and screams, and all the time stays totally convincing as the self-assured ego-tripping hero, who gradually slips into the awareness that his whole life is based on unspeakable crimes and that he is toyed with by the gods and fate. Some reviewers opinioned he acted way over the top, but I assume it was all deliberately so orchestrated by Pasolini, emphasizing the origin of a Greek tragedy that had to be delivered from an open-air rostrum to a distant audience.

The locations are dazzlingly beautiful, Morocco in fact, not Greece, but it works wonderfully well, as do the weird costumes which look like they were sowed and tinkered by the crew or the many locals themselves, but with the amazing effect of something out of a dream (or nightmare). The musical score is extremely subtle, at many times just the soft bleak rhythmic blows of a single drumstick, with an almost haunting effect.

Strangely enough the prologue and epilogue are set in modern times, this doesn't add anything as far as I'm concerned, but as it was it gives us yet some other beautiful images, with the same vast green lawns and waving tree-tops in the opening and closing scene, completing a perfect circle.