The Letter Never Sent

“The Letter Never Sent” directed by Mikhail Kolatozov is, above all, a film of and about passion, the manifold forms in which fire courses within, rages across and deeply defines the human struggle to find, create, experience and share a life of meaning and value on a personal level and within the collective.

“Letter” is an updated Tale of the Round Table. Medieval, that is to say “timeless”, characters in modern guise- three geologists: Konstantin, the young couple Tatyana and Andrei, and the group’s guide, Sergei- are dropped off by helicopter into the silent vastness of the Siberian tundra. Their arduous mission is to locate the much hoped-for treasure of diamonds that scientific understanding strongly suggests must be present, though no previous expedition has succeeded in finding any hint of the precious stones. This form of nature’s unceasing wealth will provide profitable and productive livelihood and pay for a futurity of further discovery- the exploration of outer space.

What makes this 1959 Soviet-era film remarkable is that- within a setting in which the grand and ruthless power of nature dominates and dwarfs the human figures- four distinct and fully realized character portraits are achieved.

Sergei’s life is akin to that of the huntsman/adventurer. Battling the elements is his home territory; sensation and action are his defining characteristics. He demands his right to distance from the others even as he grows aware that he has fallen in love with Tatyana. He is moved and transformed by the emergence of a passion and need for the other he never dreamed possible; in his inmost soul he recognizes that this love will never be consummated.

Andrei is the inverse figure to Sergei. Earnest and dedicated to his career, he has found a biding and requited love with Tatyana. Open-hearted, his energy is primarily mental; he is the husbandman who nurtures and cares for the fulfilling passion that life has brought to him.

Tatyana, herself a committed scientist, is also the instinctive feminine, passionately in love with life, utterly able to sense and deliver what the moment requires. She understands and values the unique qualities of each of the men. Her love for Andrei is deep and genuine; it must be seen as an aspect of her hunger for life.

Konstantin- the film’s narrator- is the group’s leader, a sage and irrepressible knight errant. He is the explorer who is compelled by the vision of finding and bringing new riches to mankind. His is the essential understanding that saving/securing the priceless material is his only purpose; for the seeker, this alone can complete human incarnation.

Konstantin’s mode of centering himself on the expedition (from whence the film derives its title) is to write to his beloved wife, Vera. Vera, whom we only see as a shimmering presence of memory or projection, is unmistakably an inner figure on Konstantin’s journey, like Beatrice to Dante.

Over the entire summer and well into the autumn the band struggles in the grueling and unrewarded labors of trying to locate the diamonds and with the unfolding and deepening of their individual stories. Konstantin cannot believe that both his deep, experienced intuition and the scientific data could be wrong, and regretfully acknowledges that without positive results there will be no more expeditions.

Frustrated in discovery of diamonds and of love, Sergei doubles his efforts digging relentlessly into the open wounds of the earth. Charged and pushed to the limit, his physical pull toward Tatyana is at its most overpowering. She averts the moment absolutely, yet with a keen emotional understanding that respects Sergei’s sincerity and tenderly affirms his feelings for her at exactly the right note of intimacy. Thus, though unrequited, Sergei’s love for Tatyana enables him to experience the miracle of his need for the other, thereby touching a place of inner completion.

Tatyana’s expansive and deeply human gesture seems as if to usher in the discovery of the diamonds. The group’s dedication and efforts are rewarded; it seems now that their journey has meaning. They prepare to return to Moscow with the confirming samples and maps to the treasure lode. It seems that all has ended well.

During the night the entire forest bursts into a great fire, surging in every direction. Sergei fearlessly races to secure the provisions already loaded into the small boats, as Konstantin, Andrei and Tatyana are barely able to collect their equipment and follow. Caught behind a raging stand of flames, Sergei throws the bags of supplies to the others, knowing that he will be consumed in this final quest. With his death comes a downpour of rain, diminishing- though not extinguishing- the fire, giving the survivors a slim chance to track a path to rescue.

They can only move as the fire permits, zigzagging over the treacherous terrain. Andrei injures his leg; radio contact for revealing their whereabouts to the base camp is lost. Andrei’s precipitous physical decline requires Tatyana and Konstantin to carry him as more and more of everything extra is discarded. His awareness that he has become extra baggage eventuates in his reasoned and loving plea that they leave him behind and try to save themselves. They refuse; he slips away, disappearing into the icy waters as the other two sleep. His is the second and complementary sacrifice to the needs of the now group of two.

Frantic and unable to find him, Tatyana is pierced to the core by Andrei’s suicide, her inability to save him. Yet she must stay present to what is needed next. As the Siberian winter begins to take hold she and Konstantin face the most elemental survival odds: can they, without supplies and food, make it to a clearing or the large river before the ice petrifies them? Finally there is nothing more for her to do; the moment has become frozen in time. Now she can only affirm her own death. Konstantin is left on his own.

Miraculously, he makes his way to the ice-crusted river, glistening in the dim afternoon light like the diamonds they have all sacrificed so much to achieve. He cobbles a raft from a fallen tree and loose brush. He knows that he cannot survive to deliver his message. Because he understands that personal survival is without meaning, whereas the sacred stone holds the complete meaning of both symbol and substance, he recognizes with almost his last strength that he can drift down the river and out to sea on an iceflow; there he will be visible and found after his death with the treasure and map in his pocket.

Interweaving four characters with this level of complexity so that the viewer can see each destiny fulfilled and can grasp that securing the treasure for the use of the community is the ultimate human purpose allows the director to convey a vision of futurity of far greater significance than the specific politics of the state. Only the unconditionally embraced journey can lead to the new.

Cassandra's Dream

Woody Allen’s provocative new film “Cassandra’s Dream” might aptly be titled ‘All in the Family’. It opens with two young men, brothers Ian and Terry, caught -like everyone- in the maelstrom of modern consumer capitalism, feverishly scheming to buy a beautiful sailboat they cannot afford. The men reinforce each other’s desires in exactly the wrong ways and hoped-for rescue from their uncle Howard, the mother’s brother and a self-made tycoon, turns out to be the sealing of their terrible fate.

They want the boat. Already it is a symbol of a futurity of freedom based on a shared childhood memory of an idyllic afternoon sailing. That they are too young to be looking back so desperately and so longingly is only one of several sirens screeching from the wings. Terry, a mechanic at a local auto shop is a gambler. Recent winnings at the dog track secure the boat and the dog’s name, Cassandra’s Dream, is not heard as warning but used to christen the new purchase.

Ian and Terry are not unsuccessful, per se, but going nowhere and hopelessly adrift on the raging tide of modern life that is predicated on buying what one cannot afford. Installment plans, credit and subsidies are the smoke and mirrors that soften the hard edges of unrelenting routine and shrinking futures.

The young men and their parents live a comfortable life well beyond their means, subsidized by uncle Howard. Long ago their ultra-practical mother accepted that- without the largess from her brother- the earnings from her husband’s barely sustainable restaurant would have left them an impoverished family and made untenable her agreeable days of television and cigarettes. She shares her brother’s vision, minus the ambition.

The more substantial sibling, Terry, has an innate desire to live within his means; he serves an inherent moral sense. It is his voice that speaks the weightless Cassandra-like prophecies so easily and reflexively deflected by his brother Ian. But Terry can neither afford nor maintain conviction; he is drowning in alcohol, pills and gambling debt. Ian, on the other hand, lacks character and conviction equally. Time after time in their conversations, his vacuous amorality trumps Terry’s decency. Terry simply must have money for booze and the gaming table, thus, must defer to Ian even as he inwardly wrestles with the wrongness of Ian’s point of view.

Ian is willing to believe and do whatever it takes to keep alive his fantasy of future potency as a hotel mogul while he marks time working in the family restaurant. On the sly he borrows flashy Jaguars from his brother’s auto shop and pretends he already has the life to match the cars. His eye is always roving for the ‘upgrade’; he dumps a waitress from the restaurant for Angela, an attractive but talentless actress whose image, and costliness, is more fitting to his imagined life.

One scene alone stands in contrast to the rest of the film. Angela’s parents come into London, presumably to meet the new financier-beau. In a brief moment the father takes Ian aside, conceding that he knows his daughter is high-maintenance merchandise. He reveals that he, too, once had a chance for a life at the high stakes table, but recognized he hadn’t the nerves or stomach for it and became, instead, a driver for the men he was destined not to emulate. Here is one small man who can take his own measure and face what he sees. But times have changed.

Enter uncle Howard! Despite humble beginnings, he established himself as the head of an international enterprise with vague medical associations; over the years his financial success has kept his sister’s family afloat. His nephews hope he will rescue them, again, as usual. Howard is readily willing to foot the bill for the boys’ new futures, but has a favor of his own that is the price of their second chance. As in all higher-level financial dealings, Howard’s gains have been at the expense of others; he is actively immoral. Irregularities in his business affairs have not so much been found out as that there is now a witness, a former colleague, willing to testify. Howard faces exposure, jail and ruin, while his nephews need his economic support- Terry to erase his outsize debt, Ian to sign on to his dream investment.

Howard contracts his nephews to remove the threatening witness by whatever means they choose. Beyond economics this is their opportunity to internalize the truth that the world’s morality is whatever you can get away with and that the spoils belong to the victor. Whoever accepts those rules has a fighting chance to make a mark in life; everyone else (like the boys’ father) is merely washed in and out by the waves.

The neat small core of the film is the planning for the crime and the after effects of its execution. Terry, predictably, cannot live with himself in the secret knowledge of his participation. For Ian, this has just been one more disagreeable task on the road to imagined power and prestige.

As the witness’ plan to tell all against Howard set the central plot in motion, the threat that Terry, burdened by conscience, will expose what occurred repeats the same idea. He must be gotten rid of for Howard and Ian to feel safe. Now it is brother versus brother in a battle for survival. The plan Ian contrives to make Terry’s death appear a suicide looks foolproof; however, at the last moment Ian’s will is not strong enough and it is he that cannot survive. Herewith comes the repetition of the theme that immorality can only succeed when it has no boundary.

The film ends with the police speculating about the double-death: lots of booze and drugs; one kills the other, by accident or on purpose, the survivor kills himself.

In Woody Allen’s pitch-dark vision, there are neither wins nor partial triumphs; death and destruction claim their daily victims, preparing the way for the story’s next version. The Cassandra of myth (she whose prophecy was fated not to be believed) lingers on in some new story with the same characters. Corrupt CEOs and those in their debt continue to play out the inertial life of money.

Last Year at Marienbad

“Last Year at Marienbad” (or was it Fredericksbad?) explores the phenomenon of memory and the idea of possibility in the context of the spa-going European rich between the wars. More precisely, its concern with memory- which on the surface is about identifying and proving what happened when, where and to whom- describes an obsession with naming literal events that had no outcome last year anymore than they can in the present.

Alain Resnais’ film moves through repetitive ritual to a depiction of the stagnation which results when forms and patterns of behavior become surrogates for action. The environment of Marienbad is an active element of the film barricading and confounding any possibility that even chance could enter the equation to counter inertia.

The film begins with long, elaborate and repetitive scenes of the setting of the luxurious spa. Its gilt encrusted ceilings and walls; the endless enfilade of dimly glittering hallways and heavily paneled doors that lead to more hallways and other doors, an ineluctable Piranesian loop.

The colorless trompe l’oeil murals of the walls and the occasional framed period etching depict formal gardens almost identical to the flat geometric park surrounding the villa. These images are less works of imagination than random game board instructions. They are relentless reminders for the characters parading from room to room, that this world operates in single-point perspective, where depth is merely alluded to by way of elaborate adjustments and calculations. It isn’t actually achievable, let alone desirable, by the rules of their game.

On stage an actress and actor- dressed, coiffed and bejeweled exactly as the audience members at the spa’s little theater- deliver their lines as if automatons. All of the characters, only three of whom emerge as actual identities, share a lifelessness which is inescapable.

The narrative voice belongs to one of them, the suitor. His pervasive role is to establish, particularly with the woman he pursues, what happened when they met the year before and fell in love. His fractured argument moves to define what has to have happened at that time for him to know all that he does about her. Almost convincing in its specifics, the case he makes nonetheless lacks any embodied reality.

That this is so continually leads the viewer back to the film’s central paradox: the very urgency of unveiling the truth about last year is trumped by the certainty of inertia. The suitor cannot differentiate between persistence and will, which he entirely lacks and fears. The unrelenting quality of his quest is entirely betrayed by his willingness to postpone action.

The object of his love, the exquisite, young Delphine Seyrig, is a parody of restless passive beauty. Neither can she give herself to anyone or anything, nor can she maintain a position or point of view (- she never stays anywhere more than a few weeks and, repeatedly, we see her break the heel of her shoe.) She represents fear in its overt form. Her modus operandi is escape; whether sitting, standing, lying or walking her internal focus is on knowing where the exit from the moment lies. For her, fear is not a negative emotion, but a comfortable milieu and an actual safeguard enabling an exploration which cannot eventuate in any conclusion. Even if unwillingly, she can endure small doses of her pursuer’s portrayal of what transpired when last they met. Her decisive place of confidence rests in her ability to counter any certainty about what happened with the parry that decision can await a future time. Such time, of course, could never actually present itself, since only the fear has life.

The third figure, her husband, is an agent of death who inspires fear. Little more capable of action than the others (who represent feelings of fear and sentiment), he represents will, though meaningless and without effect.

The symbol of his might is a game/trick that he displays early in the film to establish his dominance among the residents at Marienbad. Sixteen objects- matches, cards- are placed in four rows: 7. 5. 3. 1. The rule: each of the two players may, in a given turn, take away one or more pieces, but only from one row. Whoever must take the last piece loses. The husband calmly asserts that though he could lose, he never does.

Everyone wants to figure out a strategy or gimmick to explain the winner’s luck: who goes first; take away even numbers only; etc. But the game can only be won by paying attention as you go. The husband neither needs to confuse nor cheat; he only has to concentrate- an impossibility for the other characters who are either unconscious or dead in their faithful observance of meaningless forms. The husband lives only through the will to win, however pointless. Obviously the winnings mean nothing to him, only the power.

That power also describes his hold on his wife. Given that his very presence inspires fear, he is her perfect mate. She gets to hold onto the freedom of being afraid without respite, while he gets to experience total control with the absence of desire. Each of these characters remains impervious to any external stimulus; each also achieves constancy of occupation because their own feeling states never bore them. They are ghosts in an airless world. Like the images on the walls, the characters live a 2-dimensional existence, lacking depth in every sense of the word. Their world is like a blueprint or a map, where a journey can be conceived, plotted and traced, even confirmed, but never taken.

When finally the wife does go off with the suitor, they are each fulfilling a role like young children in a school play, or markers on a game board. The suitor does not want, nor can he, change his role to become a man, the lover. He is terrified of will and force- potency, and of the loneliness of even momentary non-consensuality. The wife cannot live in an environment free from fear and the need to escape. Having nothing but surface and form, she has nothing to give to a man who would want her as a woman. Equally powerless where real action is concerned, the husband cannot stop them, but knows they can go nowhere.

As the fatelessly mismatched couple flees into the night, the narrator puzzles over how it is possible, in this plain, flat garden- devoid of all vegetation or any obfuscating element, where everything is straight paths and right angles- that, even now, they are losing their way.

The Education of Fairies (La educacion de hadas)

The Education of Fairies by director Jose Luis Cuerda pretends to take place in the present; it is really a wondrous fairy tale. Like all such stories, it offers a warning of the dangers of living in a partial world with a partial view, however beautiful.

Nicolas, a middle-aged toy designer with mercurial sparkle in his eyes, lives in a beautiful and rambling stone casita in the Catalan countryside with his childhood nanny-cum-housekeeper. On a flight to Barcelona he sees Ingrid and her precocious young son, Raul, and instantly falls madly in love with both.

Ingrid, an ornithologist, is conveniently divorced from her son’s now dead father who was a pilot and a Viscount, which makes her the modern equivalent of a princess. She and Nicolas marry and for two years happiness reigns in the secluded domain. Nicolas and Ingrid enjoy a passionate love life and Raul receives a fanciful education on the lives and powers of fairies in his nightly bedtime stories from Nicolas. The stepfather and young boy bond deeply in walks in their own enchanted forest complete with magical trees and a secret hideaway.

Then the magic seems to come undone, the spell broken. Raul will not agree to being adopted by a man with such a common last name. Ingrid wants separate bedrooms, complaining of Nicolas’ snoring, and then threatens a more complete break. But why? He loves her; she loves him; there is no one else. All we know is that Ingrid is a beautiful woman who is about to turn 40 and breaks into tears whenever she looks into the mirror. While waiting for Ingrid to decide, act or explain her withdrawal Nicolas makes too many nervous trips to the local supermarket, where he meets Sezar, the abused checkout clerk.

Sezar, the grandchild of martyred Spanish Republicans, has come to Barcelona from her native Algeria en route to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She is waiting for her final letter of acceptance. Meanwhile she meets a charming street performer who turns out to be a drug dealer. Molested by her ogre boss at the market, beaten up by two thuggish co-horts of her now-jailed ex-boyfriend, she crosses paths with Nicolas who sweeps her into his vintage white Jaguar Roadster and out of this mess.

He takes Sezar to the secret hideaway in the enchanted forest where he tells her his story- more than he has revealed to Ingrid. The lonely child of an unmarried mother, his only romantic attachment prior to Ingrid was with Beatrice, the discarded last girlfriend of his bankrupted and suicided father. Beatrice died pregnant with Nicolas’ unborn child. Even Nicolas’ glamorous car is second-hand from his father; he and Ingrid and Raul live in the house inherited from his dead grandparents. He lives entirely in the imagination trying to obviate and compensate for a lineage of sorrow and neglect. He has made nothing in life but games.

Raul has received another education, more practical and worldly, from interaction with his classmates and their parents. Moreover, like Sezar, he has a fiery past and a sense of the future. The image of his aviator father disintegrating in mid-air for a noble cause feeds his heroic nature and his practical side knows that he will grow up to be the next Viscount Rocca di Castelgrande. He despairs of the unhappiness in his house but will not succumb in sorrow and dreams. He goes to the magic tree in the enchanted forest and discovers Sezar. He mistakes her for one of the fairies he has been trying to contact to fix the obvious and inexplicable problems between his mother and much-loved stepfather.

Raul has been told that fairies have a kind of amnesia and must be re-educated into their prodigious powers. He leaps to the task with gusto and faith, constantly checking Sezar’s mathematical abilities to verify his progress. Raul and Sezar are kindred spirits, alive to the action of life. Sezar is literally physically scarred by an endless litany of life’s cruel tragedies but she has transformed them into stepping-stones out of the past and toward a new future.

She receives the letter of acceptance to the Sorbonne. Before leaving for Paris Sezar confronts Ingrid, who reveals what she has kept from the others. Ingrid has been told, and tests have proven, that she has an incurable, though not cancerous, lesion in her brain- that she could die at any moment, though she appears radiantly healthy. She has decided, alone and unilaterally, that it will be best for Nicolas and her son if she leaves them now, before the envisioned ugliness and pain arrive. Trapped within the powers of her negative imagination, Ingrid is haunted by the vivid specter of that which is not there and blind to the reality and challenge in front of her.

Sezar is not so romantic and points out that any of them could die at any moment and offers Ingrid her philosophy of active determination and joy, suggesting that Ingrid tell Nicolas her buried secret. Sezar has done what she can and rides out of the story and into her destiny on a modest motorbike. The film ends with Ingrid, alone, pacing back and forth on the balcony, undecided about what to do and unknowing of how to decide.

One wishes for a simple, happy ending for all, but it cannot be so. Nicolas and Ingrid cannot confide in each other and with outer lives of independent ease and comfort they lack a means of connection to a larger world and remain characters in an entirely personal, storybook dimension. In that partial sphere even the blessings of love and kindness are not enough to satisfy and set free real people. Sezar has passed many tests in the world and knows she has the strength to desire and choose life. Raul has met his first challenge on the road to adulthood with courage, ingenuity and humility. She and Raul live outside the spell of romantic, beautiful sadness in which Ingrid and Nicolas are still caught.

Irene Jacob as Ingrid and Ricardo Darin as Nicolas are both superb in capturing the haunted anguish of their character’s inability to mature. Victor Valdivia as Raul and Bebe as Sezar give engaging performances filled with life, hope and joy.

Pasolini- A Proposed Trilogy

Pier Paolo Pasolini made one trilogy- The Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) and intended to make a Trilogy of Death. Salo’ is the only completed film from this intended trilogy. For me, an unintended trilogy shaped itself while viewing Teorema, Porcile and Salo’ at a Pasolini retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Each film is a masterwork on its own, yet combines with the others in surprising and, perhaps, unexpectedly obvious ways, to create a full and complex vision saturated with Pasolini’s exploration of the nature, boundaries and interpenetrations between the religious and the human. The films also describe an arc of stylistic progression: Teorema is a mythic tale, as pure and stark as an early renaissance mural cycle by Bellini or Carpaccio; Porcile is a time- and world-traveling double story juxtaposing mercantile contemporary sophistication with a 16th century fantastic fable; Salo’ is an anti-tale 3-ring circus from Hell, its cinematic artistry conspicuously inept and fragmented, entirely stylized and utterly without stylishness.


Part One, Teorema

Teorema begins with a desolate and otherworldly rock-strewn landscape seen from high above through a thin scrim of rapidly shifting clouds that look and feel scratchy, harsh and dry. Dividing this wasteland is a jagged line that could be a road; if so, it is a forlorn path toward and from nothing imaginable. Perhaps it expresses division, boundary, a marking of this from that.

Cut to a contemporary documentary-style Interview in which a journalist questions the workers at an Italian factory that has just been “given” to them by the owner: Will it, by default, make them all into bourgeois capitalists? No Comment, the reply. The recollection of this prologue echoes at the end of the film creating a non-existent Epilogue that entirely repositions the premise of the journalist’s question.

Three is a charm: Flash back, now, to the beginning of the mythic tale in its 1960’s setting. The “king” is the factory owner and father. His royal family (the mother, son and daughter) is augmented by the faithful housekeeper, Angelina. Their realm is an exquisite and fully modernized Palladianesque villa with a vast walled garden outside Milan. Though beautifully appointed, it is a sleek and desolate home of icy precision. Even the kitchen is untroubled by any signs of food or use. The sumptuousness is entirely contained in the endless and expensive proportions of smooth polished surfaces.

An unappreciated and imperfectly cherubic messenger of the gods brings a telegram to the gated domain: Arriving Tomorrow, it states. An unexplained and somewhat mysterious attractive, blue-eyed young man arrives the next day and all the pent-up or unacknowledged energies of Eros begin to stir in this household. First Angelina and then the entire family, including the father, succumb to this Adonis’ physical charms. Then, just as suddenly, the messenger arrives with another telegram commanding the mysterious young man to depart the next day.

The royal house is collectively and individually shattered. The divine itself is brought into question: the young man is barely more than a handsome cipher, but one that can intuit and actively respond to the deepest needs of the others.

After the young man’s departure it is again Angelina who is first to respond. She sneaks away from the villa, going home to the countryside. Silently she sits on a bench, eating nothing but nettles, becoming a quasi-pagan proto-saint spectacle for the local peasants who can only understand her gestures in the imagery of the church. She fulfills the faith they invest in her by healing a leprous child and floating in the air.

Eventually she comes down from the sky and beckons an old woman to follow her to an empty excavation site for a new apartment house complex where she buries herself in the soft dark earth. I will not die, she says, signaling for the old woman to shovel more dirt on top of her. Angelina folds herself back into the earth from which she has come and of which she is still a vital part; her separate and temporary individual journey has come to its fulfillment and she reunites with her own earthly essence like a drop of rain falling into the ocean. Streams of tears flow from her eyes not from grief but as the much-needed sustenance for what is yet to come.

The daughter falls into a coma, her right hand clenched as if on the memory of her encounter with the young man, literally trying to hold time still. By refusing to awaken and acknowledge the movement of time, of life, she exists only in the past, trying to make even the future into the past.

The son imagines himself an artist and propels himself out into the world, alone, though obviously generously funded. His stance is a false obsession with futurity and a prideful compensation for what he sees as his shameful recognition of being different, needy and incomplete. He attempts to create a new and perfect world that is little more than attractive formal obfuscation. The illusion of sui-generis expressionistic art cannot hide the reality that all his efforts are guided by the literalized image of the beloved and are an attempt to regain something lost and irrevocably outside himself, not an exploration of anything new. He has not taken in the gift of the divine and therefore cannot create anything from it. Though he convinces himself he is moving fearlessly forward, his gestures are empty and angry.

The mother tries to keep the fire of the divine eternally alive in the present by re-living the act of corporeal love with other young men, picked up randomly on street corners. Her conscious and voluntary degradation ultimately leads her to a decaying and nearly abandoned old church. She understands her dilemma to be religious- a search for meaning that, for her, previously did not exist. She has no illusions about the absence of dimension in her life or the limits of her own capabilities. The encounter with the young man and her subsequent attempts to recreate it simply made her aware of these truths. In honoring that awareness and her own limitation, she at least finds the humility her children lack.

The film’s ultimate scenes with the father are perhaps the most startling, complex and original cinematic evocation of a complete shift in consciousness. The father searches to comprehend the significance and ramifications of his encounter with the young man. He is the only one not entirely enthralled by the idea of revitalization through the erotic aspect, knowing that it alone cannot be the portal to a new dimension. Like Angelina in her very different way, he knows that sacrifice, giving away all that he has gained and achieved- the factory to the workers, his very self to the cosmos- is the only means to achieve an essential freedom from the trappings of persona that limit not only what he sees but how he is seen.

The father enters the train station; where is he going? He sees a beautiful young man, who imagines, as we might, that the older man is looking for sex and cautiously acquiesces to the unspoken request by going into the Men’s Room. But that is not what the father is looking for. He turns away; a young child with its mother wanders by and he kneels down and lovingly smoothes its blond hair and, rising, slowly begins to take off his clothes in the middle of the station.

His action makes him invisible to the outside world. It makes him, for the onlookers, into a “crazy person”. Either way, the result is that he is no longer recognizable, even to himself. The scene shifts abruptly to the wide empty desert terrain where the father, nude as a new-born and equally as defenseless, stumbles across the dusty plain under the searing glare of a harsh noon light, trying to determine a course, a direction, some meaning, anything. He falls into the parched bleached earth and, lifting himself up, screams.

It is significant that no one in the film is evil. The preconceptions and limitations of persona show, except for the father and Angelina, a missing of the message transmitted by the erotic.


Part Two, Porcile

Porcile (Pigpen), the second feature of this proposed trilogy, begins with a view of the same dry, colorless vista that opens and closes Teorema, except that now the rocky landscape is alive, heaving with smoky volcanic activity. A butterfly appears suddenly- a surprising vision of life: colorful, beautiful, and fragile. Equally unexpectedly, a hand darts out trapping the delicate insect and stuffs it into the mouth of a ravenous disheveled young wanderer dressed in the tattered rags of a 16th century European peasant.

Is he the new incarnation of the father from Teorema, reborn in that vast wasteland as a scavenging savage? He hurls boulders at the ground, stalking and killing a gyrating snake, tearing into the warm scaly half-alive flesh with his bare teeth.

Woven into this soon to be far more outlandish fable is the contemporary story of an enigmatic young man, Julian, his crippled father and Julian’s bourgeois fiancée, who coolly and intellectually considers the appropriateness of their intended coupling from a mercantile perspective of increasing profit and multiplying shares.

Porcile is a complex double parable on the theme of blind ruthlessness, seen in two very different environments. The contemporary story is, perhaps, the continuation of what might have happened after the factory of Teorema has been given to the workers. A battle of greed narrows the field to two operators- Julian’s father, a cold buffoon of calculating avarice and entitlement who represents the ostensibly more rarified and retreating modality of bourgeois pretension, and his rival, a jaunty plastic-surgeryed shape-shifter who does whatever is necessary to get what he wants and is aligned with the future, powered by the expedients of science and technology and ornamented with the heartless prejudice of easily distorted data.

These characters are each one side of the same coin and their world is a cold, dead parody of life predicated on the ceaseless flow of product and consumption which is mirrored in the lingering scenes of the huge, bored omnivorous pigs cramped into their compartmented pens, ultimate consumers waiting to be fed until they, in turn, are slaughtered and fed to others.

The 16th century fable centers around the young wanderer who is not just a ravenous scavenger killing and consuming the few living things he encounters, but, it turns out, a cannibal as well. A strange logic and precise rituals, however, guide his actions. When he kills the first of his human victims, a foot soldier straggling behind his troop, he cuts off the dead man’s head and throws it into a smoking orifice in the rocky hillside.

Next we see the cannibal eating the dead man’s roasted flesh, but- miraculously? - at his side, also consuming what would be his own body, is the soldier-victim himself, now regenerated (-from the severed head tossed back into the smoky mouth of Mother Earth?)

The cannibal and his resurrected soldier-victim go on to attack and consume others, always first enacting the ritual of cutting off the head and offering it back into the earth, thus mysteriously increasing the size of their band in direct proportion to the number they kill and consume.

Eventually one would-be victim escapes and makes his way back to the city where troops are marshaled and a trap set to capture the cannibal and his band. In chains and under heavy guard the outlaws are brought to the city to await the word of the court.

In the contemporary story the rival forces Julian’s father to acquiesce to a business partnership leveraged in his favor using the threat of exposure of a questionable but accepted rumor implying perverted bestial sexuality to Julian. The titillating rumor is obviously false yet easier to accept than Julian’s un-bourgeois ways and his maddeningly quixotic impartiality. He could be a figure of redemption, of relief for the others who are trapped in stultifying literal materiality, except that they do not experience their limited reality as suffering. Julian’s fiancée leaves him for a more predictably profitable alliance.

The fable continues as the judges emerge from deep inside the medieval citadel while church bells clang riotously, drowning out the actual words of the sentence they read aloud. The condemnation is the accusation of evil; the punishment: to be taken back into the desolate wilds and tied, each limb attached to a stake driven deep into the earth, their bodies exposed, to be ripped apart and devoured by roaming animals.

The cannibal is unrepentant, accepts his lot and declares his crime: that he killed his father; that he ate human flesh; that he trembles with joy. His followers, though already dead and resurrected, cry tearfully and struggle against their death-sentences in a magical moment of cinematic confusion.

In the film’s ultimate scenes Julian quietly leaves his father’s pristine palatial house, crosses the vast manicured lawn and disappears into the pigpen.

A crowd of peasants arrives at the villa as the party celebrating the business merger of the father and rival is about to begin. They ask to speak not to Julian’s father, the estate’s padrone, but to whomever of the two, father or rival, is strongest. Julian’s father readily and happily concedes his inferiority, declaring himself suddenly overwhelmed by a consuming desire for a cream-puff and lurches out of the room on his crutches, leaving the rival, now partner, to negotiate this unwanted and unseemly interruption.

The peasants, cautious and respectful, barely know how to begin their incomprehensible account. The rival taunts them to be quick and not waste his time. One of them explains that had they not seen “it”, they would never have known: Julian abandoned himself into the pigpen and was consumed entirely, even his clothes, by the huge gluttonous animals. They arrived too late to save him, not even a scrap of clothing could be salvaged to attest to the tragedy.

Not a sole of a shoe, the rival demands? No. Not even a single button, he asks? No, not even a single button, they lament. Then don’t say a word to anyone, the rival commands, happy with the good fortune that yet another inconvenient obstacle has removed itself from his path to success.


Part Three, Salo

Though all three films hold a line of continuity through detail, ideas and form, Salo’ provides the retrospective arc of trilogy for Teorema and Porcile.

In hindsight Teorema becomes a classic and simple legend of small scale and deep resonance. The earthly horizontal plane of existence and the vertical dimension of psychic depth are united and activated in the characters’ encounter with the divine in its aspect of Eros. Theirs is a world and world-view in which the erotic and the divine are still inextricably linked and alive. The nature of each character’s submission to or rebellion from his/her new awareness is fundamentally a religious experience.

In Porcile the depth dimension has been subverted into the service of the earthly plane of profit and technology. The crippled father and his rival still enjoy the benefit of energies greater than themselves and each retains and maintains a sphere in which to act out that power: the father in culture and history, the rival in commerce and futurity. For both, money underpins it all. In a parody of fevered comedia dell’arte bravura, their interactions are fueled by a sublimated and redirected Eros no longer connected to the divine but banished to the Board Room. Julian has the power derived from depth and interiority but in this thin and brilliant world can find no place where and no one for whom these qualities are credited with value or given room to operate. Being neither for nor against the bourgeois principle he becomes irrelevant and disappears without a trace or sense of loss on the part of the others. They are too consumed with success to take notice or care.

Set in the winter of 1944-45 in a Nazi-occupied northern Italian town of otherwise idyllic beauty, Salo’ is the precinct of unbridled power and corruption of four high government officials. They are called the Masters and derive from Porcile by way of the condemning judges and from the unthinking omnivorous pigs that consume everything (including Julian)- either literally manifested in the animals of the pigpen or metaphorically as the father and rival.

The Masters have assembled a collection of Victims, 18 beautiful adolescent boys and girls, imprisoned, naked, in a rural villa that is a gross and deformed extension of the pleasure palaces of the 18th century. Upon these adolescents the Masters act out their sexualized fantasies of rage, domination and filth. A small band of armed young ruffians, accomplices, supports and enforces the Masters’ authority. Four aging Madams are the Storytellers who take turns in nightly performances meant to ignite the lust of the Masters. The sexual perversions are all predictable and banal and include scatology, humiliation and every form of physical torture and mental anguish.

The actor-Victims seem halfhearted, not really “playing” their parts well, or, as the doomed adolescents, not really taking in their situation as the objects of hatred of the Masters, but how could they, after all? When the Victims start casually turning on one another the viewer’s despair sinks another level. Intermittently scored, the sound of aircraft overhead remind us that theirs is a rapidly shrinking world coming to some kind of apocalyptic end.

The final scenes of Salo’ capture the entire story. Each Master, in turn, watches from a throne placed in a second story window as the others torture the remaining victims to death. It looks like a documentary of the Inquisition, madness and lust disguised and channeled with religious zeal, death and destruction eroticized.

Protecting, or merely “attending” the Master-voyeur are two of the armed guards, themselves just boys. They have the means- their weapons- to overthrow the Masters and put an end to this outrageous tragedy, but they do not see the horror around them, their role is, in a sense, just a job. They don’t share the Master’s tastes but won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

They are bored. One turns the radio dial abruptly changing from the liturgical chant that underscored the last scenes of torture. He finds a smooth, slow dinner dance tune. He asks the other boy-guard, who is slumped in an easy chair, his machine gun splayed across his lap, Do you know how to dance? Not really, he shrugs in reply. Well, let’s try, a little. They carefully set down their weapons and start to dance, awkwardly but not unlike a random couple at a county fair killing time until something better comes along. What’s your girlfriend’s name, one asks? Margherita, the other replies- his mind elsewhere, though nowhere in particular, as death rages in the courtyard below.

The depth dimension in Salo’ is not subverted but gone. The world of Salo’ is a chaotic, capricious nightmare of real tragedy in which there is no possibility of meaning, nor is there the ability, or desire, even, to sustain the search for meaning. Eros is shackled to death; there is no sphere of operation apart from destruction. It is an apocalyptic vision almost entirely devoid of hope for it describes a level of pointlessness, stupidity and cruelty that is impervious to awareness or action. This vision bypasses any position in which the notion of transformation as development could take place. It describes a blackness darker even than the alchemist’s nigredo. That is an abstract principle, not a compromised world in which living beings must try to get by, let alone attempt to fulfill some notion of destiny, character or meaning. It is impossible to imagine that anything could re-generate from this level of corruption without first annihilating itself entirely.