•
Rating: (Good morning, DeBaser editorial staff, I have cut away half the review, trimmed the "scabrous" parts in order to have it published, I hope this is to your liking, best regards @_@)
In the Italian panorama of repression and censorship, Alberto Cavallone is not a director: he is a hero. I would define him as a fusion musician because he embodies very diverse genres, never blended in such a daring and raucous way (like a jaw-breaking punch) within the cinematograph: eroticism, surrealism, documentary, and grotesque play with each other and intertwine like ravenous lovers during the revels of the night. In any case, "Spell Dolce Mattatoio" is a Stefano production, hence the budget is negligible and the film immediately takes on the traits of genuine amateurism, a filmic low-fi without frills, with tavern-like photography and a shameless anti-dandyism: big, hard, and violent. We are historicists, come on... our man finds himself in 1977 with yet another erotic film to tackle, this time it has to be eccentric, bizarre, it has to attract attention like the vivid fan spread of a peacock. In the hands of any other craftsman, the product would have flopped into a trash heap, as we have seen many, stuffed with random sexual images, with plots akin to "elementary school thoughts aka today it's raining the farmers are happy"; but Alberto wasn't just any Guy: he had ideas. He had important readings behind him, like the Marquis De Sade and also Bataille, he had a surreal eye, more true, on people's sexual ambitions. Cavallone understood that it is sexual organs that dictate the most intimate inclinations of the human being, with Nazi sperm and Stalinist vaginal humors. Social life, ideologies, institutions, are crafted exclusively, which is very Darwinian as well, for the ultimate goal: sex. Therefore what he paints is a sex-centric scenario.
Coming to the plot... the film narrates the bucolic life in a little village in central-northern Italy, a microcosm, in reality, that captures the whole of the "bel paese", dominated by the dark and mediocre figures of the macho police and the depersonalizing church. The rest of the "nativity scene" consists of a fair of drunkard husbands, crude little farmers devoted to all shades of ugliness, ignored wives yearning for inner resurrection but destined only to be violated, fathers who impregnate their own daughters, young prostitutes abused by the law and priests akin to mafia bosses. All this punctuated by grotesque Bacchanalian feasts, anachronistic fairs, and dreams truer than true in the best tradition of Bunuel and Fellini. Did I say Bunuel and Fellini? Yes, let's say the two masters of the surreal on the brink, tormented by gambling debts, embittered, high, sleeping on the street at night between fleas and random harassments of some maniac. That's what Cavallone is, a visionary with nothing to lose and so much to say, and who says it in the most irritating, vulgar, and foul-mouthed way possible. Returning to the plot... however, it happens that this zombie-like scenario, of resigned people letting themselves grow old and die, is shaken by a young outsider to the village, a Morrison who attracts like the glare of a reflector: he is the playmate for the children, the altruistic lover for the females and sexual fulfillment, the physical outlet for jealous husbands, and the victim in the last immense scene of the film. The big boy represents, I presume, what inside of us is still alive and throbbing, not yet subdued by the sandbags of resignation. The curtain falls after a sacrifice worthy of Greek tragedy.
Final Judgment: in our squalid mental categories, we have always been made to think that sex clashed with existentialism, pain, philosophy, and that the image of a beautiful woman in sexual poses was the death of every activity of thought. "On one side angelic love and high themes - on the other porn and human base instincts." Well, this hybrid of eroticism and poetry has the gift of genuineness, of love towards what one wants to convey, has the purity that a tedious university bullshit will never have. The existential porn perhaps represents one of the most intimate and innovative cinematic outlets we could imagine. Cavallone has given us two pearls (this and the excellent Blue Movie) and for the rest, a flawed, skewed filmography, sometimes even poor and clichéd, but with those two works, he has in fact opened a new and exotic world of filmmaking.
Ps: A necessary reading of Sade and Bataille to better grasp this work.
Loading comments slowly
