•
Rating: Transposing the content of a literary work into a feature film destined for theaters and television screens is definitely a dirty job, especially if the film is meant to reflect great classics, timeless pages, and immortal poems. Moreover, the various quasi and pseudo-Hollywood factories increasingly tend to undertake the delicate paper-to-film metamorphosis, however modest the concern is about faithfully respecting plots, concepts, settings, environments, portraits, events without falling into the abyss of anachronism, error, or trivialization. Yet, in front of the screen (big or small), sprawled on couches, armchairs, or recliners with hands in bags of popcorn and various junk, the average viewer eagerly swallows, chews, and digests cultural films perhaps filled with inaccuracies and mistakes, still rich in special effects, trite sentimentalities that are so much in vogue, rampant violence, and (toy) weapons.
The production of Bukowski can be counted among the literary histories that best lend themselves to inflations, misinterpretations, and various diminishments. The works of the famous "dirty old man," steeped in the trio of sex-alcohol-poetry, rooted in the most ruthless nonconformity and drenched with a dose of cynicism/nihilism worthy of Uncle Nietzsche, can entice both lovers of low-quality pornographic-libidinous-erotic noir, but also those who dream of a possible reframing of the author and his journey with paper and pen in a dramatic-theatrical-romantic key. Both interpretations are reductive and disrespectful of the impeccable Bukowskian genius.
Tales of Ordinary Madness, by Marco Ferreri, is - in my opinion - a clumsy and rather weak attempt to render the life and writings of Charles into film. Explicitly inspired by the series of stories of the same name, which together with the Notebook, represents the essence of the philosophy and thought of the "drunk," the feature tries to condense in ninety minutes (and a little more) what Bukowski was and what he wrote: the existence of an outcast on the sunlit streets of Los Angeles, the sporadic moves towards protectors and admirers of his poetic flair - soon exhausted by his incontinence toward wine and beer, the hot love affairs and squalid watering holes, all accompanied by the continuous melodic ticking of the typewriter.
Given the extreme length (not only in content) of the collection and thus the impossibility of translating the exact stage of "ordinary madness" (and "ordinary madnesses") into scenes, Ferreri settled for narrating a modest slice of the life and thought of the protagonist, incidentally falling inexorably into the abyss of trivialization and theatricalization of the Bukowskian legend. Charles Serking is the occasional alter ego of the real Charles, and as such tends to reflect its salient features: idle, misfit, poor, solitary, alcoholic, and sociopathic, traits that nevertheless made him an appreciated forger of verses. Strolling to the City of Fallen Angels, Serking first woos Vera, a man-eating opportunist and traitor, and subsequently Cass, a self-destructive prostitute with whom he builds a strong sexual-romantic bond. Leaving the lover on the warm Hollywood hills, Charles moves to New York, convinced by some of his aficionados to become a full-time poet. However, the job lasts little, and the writer returns to Los Angeles, but not to Cass who has taken her life; in the grip of absolute pain, having lost the "most beautiful girl in the city," Serking succumbs into the most total drunkenness and is rescued by one last young woman.
For a fresh reader of the Tales, the "inspired" film abundantly disappoints expectations. Setting aside the extreme downsizing of Bukowski's work (downsizing however inevitable, given the volume of stories included in the book), the alter ego does not satisfy the author-protagonist at all, reducing him to a bland pseudo-poet with a drinking habit, caught in a sugary, romantic drama. The true Charles's verve is missing, the nihilism-cynicism dialectic - an essential keystone of the entire literary complex, is absent, that aura of external and internal filth that in the film is reduced to a shabby apartment and crusted walls. Ferreri's Bukowski doesn't even remotely reach the heights of his real-life counterpart and, though the director at least nails the social backdrop of the story, he fails to give the protagonist the expressive and "dynamic" charge savored in the pages of the masterpiece. The drunkard who makes alcohol the vital essence of his soul is portrayed as if drinking to forget a lost love, like any humanoid; the wine, the authentic ink on the paper of the Notebook, the second oxygen, seems to become a bland palliative, a tool, any medication. The real protagonist's verses, carriers of a psychological revolution in literature, fester as soon as placed in Serking’s hands, singing like anyone else on the face of the earth.
Dark, complex, hidden, enigmatic, reactionary: Bukowski’s poetry certainly doesn't reduce to a lax and summary interpretation, nor does it thin out to a single, universal manualistic comprehension. Multiple understandings, yet susceptible to equally profound reflections on man and the coherence between his life choice and the way he "sings" it. Well, Ferreri's work, though visually curated and appreciable, struggles to represent the author of nonconformism, alienation from the banal, and poetic decay.
Loading comments slowly
