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The Flower of the One Thousand and One Nights, arrived at only after numerous digressions on "destiny and a judgment of mankind." The feisty slave (Ines Pellegrini) might be Intolerance's Mountain Girl, at the auction she picks her own master in the bashful lad with moist eyes (Franco Merli). She's kidnapped but escapes to be crowned king in boyish drag, he never stops searching despite carnal distractions along the way, just two of the tiles in the mosaic. Anecdotes and prophecies, scrolls and tablets, oral and pictorial storytelling nested and paralleled and interwoven into the liquid form that is cinema. The groom (Ninetto Davoli) takes up with the seductive succubus (Claudia Rocchi) and returns too late to the jilted cousin (Tessa Bouché), a bit of Ugetsu to dolefully regale travelers in the desert. Reveries of doves drive the princess (Abadit Ghidei) away from men, a grand aesthetic gesture by the wanderer (Francesco Paolo Governale) brings her back. Out of royal robes and into holy rags, one prince (Alberto Argentino) is made a monkey of by the demon (Franco Citti) while another (Salvatore Sapienza) topples the copper colossus but can't avoid a murderous fate. "Truth lies not in a single dream, but in many." Pier Paolo Pasolini's lushest and freest work, his Tabu—he is the grinning poet cruising the village for boys, plus the masochistic bride wept over by the bewitched lunkhead. A palpable delight in the beauty of location shooting (Iran, Yemen, Eritrea and Nepal) fuels his Neverland of guiltless pleasure, a nude male torso dissolves to a procession on a broad landscape. (The ramshackle piecemeal filming adds to its touching fragility.) Third time is the charm with the cursed mound of rice, the lovers are reunited "like two full moons in the same sky." Salò the following year pointedly breaks the spell. Cinematography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini.
--- Fernando F. Croce |