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"Tutto è buono quando è eccessivo." The encyclopedia of horrors comes with a bibliography, tranquil credits and vistas ease you into Mussolini's last capital. Duke, Bishop, Judge and President, Genet's pillars of society on De Sade's holiday, "true anarchists" in their own minds. The bourgeoisie has never hesitated to kill its children, it is said, so beautiful boys and girls are corralled at the manor, a mass of innocent flesh at the mercy of the quartet's ghastly desires. "Quite diverse refinements," tales from painted old bawds and rape and humiliation and that's just the first circle, "Manie." ("Merda" and "Sangue" follow.) "Nothing is more contagious than evil." Fascism's debased erection, Pier Paolo Pasolini's annihilating political caricature. Visconti's The Damned is the point of departure but modern society is the target, the human continuum is steeped in political-sexual bondage. A very rigorous theater of cruelty, its barbarities and tedium, throughout there's the touching vulnerability of nudity in symmetrical interiors. "Ah, culo grandioso," its waste is the culmination of the pervasive anality—a scatological parody of corrupted consumption, anchored by Aldo Valletti's cross-eyed grin as a sort of demonic Danny Kaye. (Other parodies include marriage, beauty, storytelling and language itself.) Pasolini's bottomless despair and anger laid bare and exhaustively scrutinized, there's no way out of the palace of monstrous pleasures, the only artist throws herself out a window before the gruesome fireworks begin. The camera is a pair of binoculars, the audience takes turns with the spectacle and finally goes into a dance out of sheer boredom. "It is not enough to kill the same person over and over again. It is far more recommendable to kill as many beings as possible." Out of the unholy matrimony emerge such gremlins as Haneke's Funny Games and Noé's Irreversible. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |