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Reviews
Pater familias (2003)
One of the best films of the era, a tour de force return of the spirit of Pasolini
The best way to sum up this film is this: If Pasolini had gone through a "Cubist Period," this is the film he would have made. Far from not understanding the subversion of linearity, this film masterfully squares linearity. In other words, it is remarkably easy to make the story go forward with a series of flash backs. That is a simple 1-2 structure. This film goes forward, flashes back, then flashes forward but changing the point of viewing of the past events--all of which are leading up to the present.
If that sounds complicated, the plot delivers it clearly but in a way that demands the audience to think about the relationship between time and point of view.
The film is a relentless examination of the pathology of Southern Italian underclass culture--hence its evocative sense of Pasolini. It centers around boys turning into men, but doomed because the men in their lives are completely dysfunctional--the men have never grown up, they only think they have. Like Pasolini, the underclass is not on display for the middle-class to condemn: that all the characters are doomed is tragic, and indicts all of Italian culture, not the underclass itself. Clearly, however, it also avoids romanticizing the underclass (nobody could accuse this film of romanticizing the underclass).
It is a shocking film in many respects. The utter violence and dysfunction of this subculture and its enabling by the socialist state is troubling to say the least. The representation of contemporary religious life also comes as a bit of a shock. Especially in Italy, where religious communities are more readily able to cling to the traditional, Pre-Vatican II mode, a film representing a contemporary nun involved in the work of social justice is a unique turn. Further, it prevents the film from slipping into absolute hopelessness and depressiveness. Anyone can make a depressing and hopeless narrative--either about society or existence--call it a "confrontation of bourgeois tastes" and expect art-house accolades. This film does not take that route. Instead it compels the viewer to follow its probing investigation because it holds out the promise of hope. Perhaps there is finally a film-maker who has read Ernst Bloch.
That the film ends with a howl of hopeless protest does not so much function to conclude that all is lost, but rather, to suggest the point of collapse for this sub-culture and the dominant patriarchal culture which only fleetingly attends to it.
Not to be considered a follow up for "Cinema Paradiso," "Mediterraneo," or "Il Postino." Neither is it a good date film, but it is a very compelling film and a must see for anyone interested in Italian Cinema.
Almost Blue (2000)
A Well Crafted Psychological Thriller with Great Plot Twists
It is hard to see how anyone could trash this film on the criteria of craft. It is a very well made film that understands its genre and goes beyond it. In terms of generic revisionism, this film goes beyond the genre by structuring within the plot a woman trying to compete in a man's world: the detective charged with catching the serial killer. Layered onto that is the role of technology in creating a surveillance culture. Carefully plotted so that the viewer will suspect the wrong person for half the film, it creates a complex investigation, not into personal psychology, but into contemporary society: university culture, techno-pop and music culture, cop culture, and patriarchal culture.
Ironically enough, such a sustained examination of these cultural cross-currents do not anchor the film into Italy specifically--something that is exceedingly rare for an Italian film. This plot could have been just as easily set in Kracow, Oxford, Munich, Ann Arbor, or Berkeley.
It is compelling, complex, and well crafted. Tension builds, is dispersed, and builds again, only to have a twist throw it off yet again. Complaining about it generically is not only off-base, but the equivalent to complaining that every western has horses in it.