MUBI

I’m not sure how to start writing about this film. It’s a tragical-comical-historical-pastoral-metaphysical (if you will)-existential-absurdist road movie, it’s a film of celebration, it’s a dark film which is joyous despite and in the face of its darkness, and is all the more a celebration for that reason. And I love it unconditionally. Perhaps I should start with the usual anchors – director (Pasolini), date (1966) , actors (Totò, Ninetto Davoli and … a crow, plus various chance encounters), composer, cameraman and the rest of the credits that the film itself begins by setting out, in its own unique way which I won’t describe, but which says a good deal about the tone and the intentions of what comes after, some of it probably misleading. Or perhaps with the bare bones of a story: an old man and a young man, father and son, walking on some errand along a deserted road in the no-man’s-land between town and country, joined after a while by a pedantic talking crow who draws morals and meanings from the various incidents along the way until they become exasperated enough to cook and eat it. In that skeleton structure lie the ingredients of a comedy, a road movie, a philosophical fable, a filmed performance (opera buffa, miracle play, some unrecorded collaboration of Beckett and Brecht), even a relic of neo-realism cracked confused and moonstruck by twenty years of changing context.

The comedy calls on memories of the old silent clowns, with all their play with grimaces and mannerisms, slapstick chases and compromising situations, but also the black-comic dialogue routines which those clowns left behind in the music-hall they came from, and which the likes of Samuel Beckett had already salvaged and redeployed in a more uncertain context. (Talking about Uccellacci I keep coming back to Beckett; as if it was a response or a question to Vladimir and Estragon and Pozzo and Lucky.) But the only real thread of the story is the road, which stretches ahead at the beginning, at the end, and at various intermediate moments, and which seems to have no end. There are two possible aims to the journey – to collect debts or to pay them – but both incidents are no more than episodes on the way. In the end the two are just going ‘over there’, following a road in the ‘periferia’, which means ‘the suburbs’ – in the European sense – and to my ears at least also suggests a ring-road. Presumably it just goes round and round, and even if all roads are supposed to lead to Rome this one never will, although briefly, almost in a parallel universe, the travellers pass between (not into) documentary images of the city in mourning at the highly official funeral of the leader of the highly institutional PCI. Otherwise they, and the film (which is under the sign of the moon throughout, and therefore cyclical, and perhaps a little crazy) go round and round too: the story closes where it started and where it starts again, not reaching Rome, not finding Godot, but not accepting that it’s going nowhere either, since once the two travellers have eaten the crow they’re ‘condemned’ – so the crow says – to become him in some way, presumably to start looking for meanings in what happens to them even if they’re not the same meanings. The crow, incidentally, is ‘a leftist intellectual from [the fifties]‘, i.e. the crow’s assumptions felt just out of date in 1966. Pasolini said he was the crow or the crow was him. It was an uncomfortable period.

And the birds? The great and small birds appear literally in the crow’s story about St Francis’ disciples preaching to the birds and discovering that they can convert big birds and they can convert little birds, but they can’t stop the big ones eating the little ones. (A story which in the course of the telling turns Totò from Franciscan monk into the Green Man during the cycle of the seasons, but that’s another story…) Back on the ring-road Totò – who looks rather like a bird himself – proceeds to illustrate the point when the pair finds themselves in the position first of big birds, then of little ones, and apparently ask themselves no questions in either position , at least not until after the fact. Is there a way out of it? A whole tradition of Marxism is – literally and metaphorically – proclaimed to be dead and buried , the crow feels duly unnecessary and outdated and Mao as quoted is to say the least somewhat unhelpful – if arguably realistic -, but St Francis sends the two monks back to try again and once the crow is digested his habit of looking for answers is likely to be assimilated.

So that’s one use for the birds in a philosophical fable, but there’s also the whole issue of how to talk in a way that will be listened to. The monks need to find out how to talk to the birds (in fact, one step back, they need to find out how to find out), the crow tries to talk to Totò and Ninetto, not all that successfully (but digestion is also a strategy…), between ‘big birds’ and ‘little birds’ there is no communication at all and the film tries various strategies to talk to the audience and suggests a few more, including some good-humoured tweaks at other people’s (neo-realists, Fellini, Rossellini post n.r., Pasolini’s own past). Somewhere in here there’s a series of questions about the uses of comedy: is the best way to talk about something important to apparently not take it seriously, and what if the ability to not take it seriously was the most important thing of all? The crow has no sense of humour and Totò and Ninetto have no social conscience – the film has both and energy to burn, but with no direction left to go it can only travel hopefully in circles, aware that it will never arrive.

Or something. That hasn’t arrived either, I left a lot out, about time and ruins, and stray buildings, and Shakespeare and sound-track and no-man’s-lands and missed buses … It’s not that this is the greatest film ever made, or even the greatest Pasolini (probably ‘Edipo Re’), but if I had to choose one film to speak for me, I think it would be this..