What? (1972)

          A snarkier person than I could repurpose the title of this film as the entire content of the review, since watching this obscure Roman Polanski comedy is a befuddling experience. First comes the matter of the film’s obscurity. Any time I mention this picture to a fellow cinefile, they’re surprised not only that Polanski made a feature between Macbeth (1971) and Chinatown (1974), but that the feature largely disappeared until a belated video release in the Blu-Ray era. Next comes the matter of the movie itself. Although Polanski had made comedies previously, including The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), this isn’t some brisk cavalcade of jokes. Instead, What? is an epic-length surrealistic sex farce that was rated X during its first American release. (Nothing pornographic happens, but every scene is infused with carnality and/or nudity.) And finally there’s the matter of what this film says about Polanski’s muse.
          Much ink has been spilled theorizing that the gore and violence of Polanski’s Macbeth was an indirect response to the murder of the director’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by members of the Manson family. Similarly, one could draw troubling connections between What?, during which men take sexual liberties with an innocent young woman, and Polanski’s subsequent problems stemming from a sexual encounter with an underage girl. If Macbeth tells us something about the filmmaker’s anguish, does What? tell us something about the way he found release while processing grief? On a less worrisome level, it’s also possible to read What? as an homage to Tate, whose screen persona would have suited the film’s leading role of an amiably ditzy sexpot. In any event, What? is too strange to take seriously, and yet it’s not quite strange enough to qualify as some quintessentially ’70s head trip. The vibe is pure debauchery.
          Shot on the grounds of a beachside villa owned by the film’s producer, Carlo Ponti, the semi-improvised film begins with American tourist Nancy (Sydne Rome) catching a ride from a group of swarthy locals in a car. They try to rape her, but she escapes and leaps onto an elevator lift that takes her to the villa. There, she spends several days with a group of sex-crazed weirdos, including ex-pimp Alex (Marcello Mastraoianni). Nancy ends up naked frequently, so much of the film’s dialogue concerns evaluations of her breasts and inquires into her sexual availability. Polanski plays a supporting role as an oddball named Mosquito, who brags about his “big stinger.” (He’s ostensibly referring to a spear gun, but you get the idea.) Like a dumb victim in some bad horror movie, Nancy remains at the villa even though everyone there is insane, and she falls into a twisted sexual relationship with Alex. In one scene, he wears only the skin of a tiger he killed on a hunting trip, then crawls on all fours while Nancy whips him until he’s sufficiently aroused for a tryst. This stuff goes on forever, since the version of What? that I watched was two and a half hours long, even though most sources list the running time as 110 minutes (presumably the length of some edit for the American market).
          What? is pointless and prurient, but the really confounding thing about the picture is that it’s made as well as any other peak-period Polanski film. The camerawork is smooth, the editing is graceful, and some of the dialogue as droll. After Alex complains about “the evil pestilence of this house,” Nancy replies, in her breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, “You’re right—it does have a funny smell!” While many other ’70s movies venture further into the bizarre than What?, few represent such a peculiar chapter in the story of an internationally revered filmmaker at the height of his  creative power.

What?: FREAKY

A Special Day (1977)

          “I don’t think I’m anti-fascist,” the well-dressed man remarks. “If anything, fascism is anti-me.” Those simple words, revealing a world of sociopolitical significance, epitomize what makes the Italian drama A Special Day so resonant. By viewing cataclysmic historical events through the prism of one very specific relationship, the picture brings the past to vivid life while also conveying timeless truths about subjects ranging from compassion to tyranny. A Special Day is also noteworthy as one of the best collaborations between classic Italian stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Whereas many of their celebrated onscreen pairings are romantic comedies, A Special Day uses their easygoing chemistry in a more imaginative way, which nets powerful results.
          Set in 1938, the movie takes place in Rome on the day Adolf Hitler made a state visit to confer with Italy’s fascistic strongman, Benito Mussolini. The action revolves around a huge apartment building with a massive inner courtyard. In the morning, bedraggled housewife Antonietta (Loren) rouses her large family. Her husband, Emanule (John Vernon), is a staunch Mussolini supporter, so he plans to take all their kids to a rally celebrating Hitler’s visit. Given her backbreaking obligations of cleaning and cooking for the big family, Antonietta stays home. Once the apartment building is nearly empty, she happens into a conversation with a neighbor from across the courtyard, Gabriele (Mastroianni). We discover things about Gabriele gradually, learning that he’s a radio announcer recently fired from his position for mysterious reasons, and that just before he encountered Antonietta, he was close to attempting suicide.

          Giving away the other revelations about his character would diminish the experience of watching A Special Day, so broad strokes must suffice—over the course of a long day comprising conversations, flirtations, and intimacies, Antonietta discovers through her new friend a world of emotion and ideas and nonconformity that rocks her existence. By the end of the day, she’s almost a completely different person than the woman who first met Gabriele. And because the things we learn about Gabriele speak directly to the dangers of living under a totalitarian regime, he changes, too, if only in the sense of emerging from shadows by sharing provocative secrets with a friend.

          Directed by the acclaimed Ettore Scola, A Special Day achieves that rare trick in movies, presenting characters who are so fully realized they seem like real people; accordingly, even the most fanciful turns in the movie’s central relationship have credibility and depth. At different times, we experience Antonietta’s fear, loneliness, pride, and warmth, just as we experience Gabriele’s dignity, humor, joy, and sadness. Loren downplays her signature glamour, hewing closer to the earth-mother aspect of her screen persona, while Mastroianni effectively tweaks his urbane image. (Modern viewers may flinch at some aspects of the characterizations, but the portrayals fit the period during which the story takes place.) Also worth noting is the picture’s unique visual style. Scola and cinematographer Pasqualina de Santis employed a desaturated color scheme, putting the look of A Special Day somewhere between black-and-white and color, and while the look is jarring at first, it makes sense after a while; this is a story that exists between the margins of history, so it warrants an offbeat presentation.

          Given the way the horrors of World War II loom just outside the narrative, there’s something fundamentally grim about A Special Day. Surely, not every character we meet is destined to survive the next few years. Yet within the darkness, A Special Day provides much that is bright and uplifting, conveying how real human connection is the only way to bridge divides. Many well-deserved accolades came the film’s way, including two Oscar nominations (for Best Foreign Film and for Mastroianni as Best Actor), as well as a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.

A Special Day: RIGHT ON

Massacre in Rome (1973)

          The European-made World War II drama Massacre in Rome depicts a 1944 incident during which the Third Reich killed 335 citizens in reprisal for a partisan attack that left about 30 German soldiers dead. The so-called “Ardeatine Massacre” carried sociopolitical implications extending beyond the war itself, since the Vatican was asked to intervene but refused to do so. Written and directed by George P. Cosmatos, who adapted a book by Robert Katz, Massacre in Rome is a serious attempt at cataloguing the myriad factors that led to the slaughter, although the process of dramatization led Cosmatos toward both oversimplification and turgidity. Regarding the first extreme, Cosmatos transformed historical figure Herbert Kappler, the German officer tasked with organizing the reprisal, into a cinematic protagonist, which necessitated some sanding of edges. In the movie, Kappler—as played by Richard Burton—is a pragmatist who urges his commanders to exercise restraint not out of any great wellspring of human compassion, but because he knows that an excessive response will energize opposition among the Italian citizenry. Historical accounts suggest that the real Kappler had no such reservations about following the company line.

          Regarding the second extreme, that of turgidity, Cosmatos created a composite character, Father Pietro Antonelli—portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni—to represent the tricky relationship between the church and Italian partisans. Many scenes involving the priest devolve into pretentious debates about morality. Worse, the priest ultimately serves no discernible narrative function—despite fretting a lot, he never impacts the action in a meaningful way. Given these problems, Massacre in Rome is a middling film even though it’s also a sober undertaking with terrific production values. At his best, Cosmatos conveys a vision of the Third Reich’s high command as a dysfunctional family, with insane leader Adolf Hitler (who is never shown onscreen) creating a top-down climate of paranoia and savagery while more rational people eye the inevitable future after Hitler’s power structure collapses. Marginalized in this treatment of the story are the people affected by the massacre, because Cosmatos doesn’t spend enough time with the partisans or with the common people of Rome. That said, Cosmatos and producer Carlo Ponti honor the dead with a closing text crawl featuring the names of the victims.

Massacre in Rome: FUNKY

La Grande Bouffe (1973)

          An exercise in absurdity delivered by way of a narrative that explodes with grotesque excess, La Grande Bouffe tells the strange story of four European men who sequester themselves in a private estate with the goal of eating themselves to death. In lieu of explanations for why the characters want to die, cowriter/director Marco Ferreri explores behavior in loving detail, shooting the picture with the elegantly controlled color schemes and supple photographic textures of an art film while filling his frames with sumptuously designed locations and props. The disconnect between Ferreri’s rarified cinematic style and the low nature of what he films is bewildering, because La Grande Bouffe features epic flatulence, an exploding toilet that covers leading man Marcello Mastroianni with excrement, gruesome images of corpses stored in meat lockers, quasi-explicit sexual encounters, and the unpleasant spectacle of a man suffering a heart attack during a traumatic bowel movement. By comparison, the throwaway scene of the prostitute vomiting because she’s overeaten is tame.

          Although describing the plot of La Grande Bouffe serves little purpose since lots of crucial information is deliberately withheld, Ferreri and cowriter Rafael Azcona offer tantalizing hints about their characters. Mastroianni plays an airline pilot who, in modern parlance, would be described as a sex addict. Does he wish to die before he loses his looks and his virility? Philippe Noiret appears as a judge so incapable of leaving his childhood behind that he lives in his boyhood home under the emasculating supervision of his sexually voracious nanny. Ugo Tagnazzi plays a chef who seems successful and well-adjusted, though he’s an obsessive perfectionist with regard to food preparation. And Michel Piccoli plays a television producer who might or might not be a repressed homosexual, but who definitely has a difficult relationship with his daughter. The filmmakers give each character a hint of hopelessness and suggest that each character has a major unfulfilled wish—Mastroianni’s character restores a glorious old sportscar, Noiret’s character meets a woman he wants to marry, and so on.

          At the risk of a horrible pun, there’s a lot to digest here. There’s also a lot to endure, since most of what happens onscreen during this overlong film is repugnant. Mastroianni’s horny character hires hookers, which leads to exploitive scenes of the fully clothed male actors groping nude female costars and/or slathering the women’s bodies with food. In one of the film’s most intriguing elements, the men befriend a heavyset schoolteacher played by Andréa Ferréol. Initially portrayed as an innocent, the schoolteacher reveals an appetite for debauchery and gluttony commensurate with that of the self-destructive protagonists. The way her character nurtures the four men without judging or even questioning their behavior says something. What exactly that something might be of course remains mysterious, as do so many aspects of La Grande Bouffe. This movie is bizarre, disgusting, and enigmatic, but it’s also inexplicably fascinating, and the fine actors perform their outrageous roles with gusto and sensitivity.

La Grande Bouffe: FREAKY

Stay As You Are (1978)

          Were this film stripped of its trappings as a European art piece, it would stand revealed as the salacious story of a middle-aged man who cheats on his wife with a troubled young woman, even though circumstantial evidence suggests he might be the young woman’s father. Yes, Stay As You Are tackles the serious issues of adultery, betrayal, and incest by way of a glossy presentation that extensively showcases costar Nastassja Kinski sans clothing. Stay As You Are is a fairly credible movie, inasmuch as the philandering protagonist experiences an existential crisis, so it’s not as if the filmmakers pat him on the back for sleeping with his maybe-daughter. Still, despite a romantic score by Ennio Morricone and a jaunty performance by leading man Marcello Mastraoianni, Kinski’s formidable sexual power is the focus. She’s mesmerizing whenever she’s onscreen, whether dressed or not, even though her performance is tentative.

          Cowritten and directed by Alberto Lattuada, Stay As You Are stars Mastroianni as Giulio, an Italian architect who meets a schoolgirl named Francesca (Kinski) while traveling on business. Despite learning that he knew Francesca’s late mother and therefore might be her biological father, Giulio hides his suspicions from the young woman even as she flirts with him—and even as he (weakly) resists his lust for her. After the movie’s turgid middle passage, during which Giulio faces various family issues (“A frigid wife, a whoring husband, a pregnant daughter, and now an abortion for the grand finale!”), Giulio succumbs to temptation by taking Francesca to a hotel in Madrid for sex—lots and lots of sex. Francesca turns out to be a piece of work, at one point serving Giulio a cup filled with her own urine, and the story eventually moves in a bittersweet direction.

          Beyond its questionable psychosexual content, Stay As You Are has a few genuine cinematic virtues. The naturalistic cinematography by José Luis Alcaine is quite beautiful (some shots of Kinski, her long hair illuminated by the sun, are breathtaking), and Lattuada generates rich atmosphere with scenes of the artist-refuge neighborhood where Kinski’s character lives with an equally nubile roommate, who also, inexplicably, tries to seduce Mastraoinnani’s character. (The degree of male wish-fulfillment on display here is extraordinary.) In the end, Stay As You Are is probably half legitimate drama and half sex fantasy, which means it’s neither disposable softcore nor a truly lofty rumination on desire. It’s a grown-up movie that most viewers will seek out only for the purpose of reveling in Kinski’s beauty. (Available from www.CultEpics.com)

Stay as You Are: FUNKY

The Priest’s Wife (1970)

          A dreary dramedy about a woman who tries to persuade a priest to leave the church so they can marry, The Priest’s Wife is undoubtedly more palatable in its original, Italian-language version. As released in the U.S., it’s dubbed into English, but it appears that producer Carlo Ponti—husband of leading lady Sophia Loren—had the actors mouth English-language takes to ensure a useable international cut. This has the effect of making The Priest’s Wife slicker than the average Italian film repackaged for stateside consumption, but glossy presentation can’t compensate for substandard narrative content. Among other problems, The Priest’s Wife moves with such leaden pacing and unearned gravitas that it’s as if the filmmakers thought they were the first people to depict a man of the cloth experiencing forbidden love. Worse, the movie never really goes anywhere, because nearly all of the screen time is consumed with repetitive scenes of the priest negotiating with his superiors while Loren’s character entreats him to pick up the pace. So, even though The Priest’s Wife is basically humane and sincere, it’s so thin as to barely exist.

          The movie starts off fairly well, with Valeria (Loren) instigating a car chase with her no-good boyfriend, whom she has just discovered is married to another woman. Valeria runs the guy off the road, bashes his car to bits, and then beats him about the head and body for good measure. After this effective introduction to a strong woman who won’t let a man rule her life, however, the movie does an about-face by showing Valeria contemplating suicide. She calls a suicide-prevention hotline and speaks with Don Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), who offers life-affirming counsel. Ignoring his words, Valeria overdoes on pills but fails to kill herself. Upon recovery from her near-death experience, Valeria reaches out to Don Mario because she was infatuated by his voice on the phone—only to discover he’s a priest and therefore unavailable.

          None of this quite works. Valeria seems like she has multiple personalities because she’s a different woman in every scene, Don Mario’s interest in Valeria seems only to manifest once he realizes she’s voluptuous, and it’s unclear why Valeria was so impressed by someone who failed to do the one thing she asked of him. Beyond the logic problems, the picture gets stuck in a groove for most of its running time—The Priest’s Wife features a long series of bland courtship scenes, which are filled with play-acting (Don Mario tells people that Valeria is his sister) and slapstick. Yawn. That said, The Priest’s Wife has fine production values, and the Loren-Mastroianni duo is beloved by many. (The actors made nearly a dozen films together.) Beside fans of the stars, however, it’s tough to envision anyone succumbing to this movie’s meager charms.

The Priest’s Wife: FUNKY

Leo the Last (1970)

          British filmmaker John Boorman’s early career is dominated by intense action movies, from Point Blank (1967) to Deliverance (1972), but his initial output also includes some pictures so odd they approach surrealism. Leo the Last is the first such Boorman feature. Based on a George Tabori play titled The Prince, the film explores what happens when a modern-day European aristocrat returns to his family’s mansion in London after a long absence, only to discover that the streets surrounding the building have become a ghetto. The broad strokes of the storyline are simple: Prince Leo (Marcello Mastroianni) is a recluse who’s bewildered by the outside world, the craven machinations of his household staff, and the empty affections of his ambitious fiancée, Margaret (Billie Whitelaw). Therefore, Leo spends his days in an upstairs room, watching poor black neighbors though binoculars. Eventually, he develops sympathy for his neighbors’ difficult lives, so he leaves his mansion to offer assistance—an action that, naturally, upsets sycophants who value Leo’s passive status quo.

          While the story is straightforward, however, Boorman’s execution is anything but. Seemingly intent on replicating Federico Fellini’s dreamlike visual style—the presence in Leo the Last of Fellini collaborator Mastroianni is probably not coincidental—Boorman fills the screen with weird imagery. At its most overtly Fellini-esque, the movie descends into a silly orgy scene with grotesque characters mugging for the camera. Similarly, Boorman spotlights a bizarre health ritual involving naked people bouncing up and down in a pool, and the director zeroes in on unattractive, undulating body parts photographed through the distortion of underwater lenses. The excess also manifests in offbeat subplots, with Leo’s mysterious aide, Laszlo (Vladek Sheybal), organizing some sort of militaristic cult in the basement of Leo’s mansion. (Radical politics permeate the film, which can be interpreted as a somewhat trite collectivist tract.)

          Yet the movie’s oddest element is actually the protagonist’s characterization—Leo is one of those inexplicable freaks found only in the minds of overindulgent storytellers. Although Maastroianni’s handsome, healthy appearance suggests otherwise, Leo is portrayed as a terrified innocent who can’t communicate with other people, so Leo spends most of the movie looking perplexed when bad things happen, even whimpering impotently while observing assaults, a heart attack, and a rape. It’s therefore impossible to buy into Leo the Last as a credible narrative. Plus, with all due respect, Boorman’s admirable aspirations to metaphorical heft quickly descend into pretentious silliness. Nonetheless, some find greater virtue in this peculiar film than others; among other accolades, the movie received a Best Director prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Leo the Last: FUNKY