Marco Ferreri
Non Toccare La Donna Bianca

Just ten years ago, Marco Ferreri passed away, and it seems appropriate to remember him, on the spur of the moment, with a brief review that I hadn't intended to write today, but there it is. Forgive me if I'm not quite in form, but time is short, and I'm writing this almost in real time.

Few people remember Ferreri today, and in truth, when he was alive, he was never among the most mainstream filmmakers in the colorful Italian cinematic world: he was always an eccentric, a caustic, an underrated figure in life and, it seems, also in death. Today he would smile, sardonically, at all this, reveling in the fact that he has been forgotten by most.

Little loved for being unyielding towards human vices and not admitting the existence of redeeming and compensatory virtues for shortcomings, Ferreri was a kind of protestant without God, an apostate without alternative religions, a secularist without faith in secular values. Definitely an anarchist and an individualist.

"Don't Touch the White Woman" ('74) is an atypical and amusing western where almost everyone dies in the end, shot from the side of the metropolitan Indians in a Paris transformed, as if by magic, into a Little Big Horn, where instead of clearings and prairies, or Monument Valley, there is a huge chasm in the center of the French capital. There is a spatial, and obviously temporal, disorientation, the performance of all the actors (and what actors: Mastroianni, Tognazzi, Villaggio, Piccoli, Deneuve, Noiret and I forget others...) seems decidedly over the top: there is, in short, an awareness of the representation here and now to invoke the myth of the western, and at the same time the exaggerated portrayal in disdain of any - fake - realism.

The humor that pervades the plot development, with tones always destructive and never consoling, leads everyone towards a cheerful destruction, representing our society as a Titanic that swiftly, and willingly, aims for the iceberg, indeed, targets it directly. And without lifeboats.

One of my favorite musical tracks is Amused to Death by Roger Waters: it would be an ideal soundtrack for this film, which mockingly explains to us how the human race enjoys dying, consumed by the desire for power and destruction.