"The truffle preserves the contact with the old world and Tradition"
Pig by Michael Sarnoski (debuting director) is one of the most beautiful films of this almost over 2021.
It is a film where the ascetic and anti-modern perspective of its protagonist — a stratospheric Nicolas Cage, living in the woods, isolated from modernity, in an original condition of independence and suspended in time, thanks to truffles and only with his pig — clashes with the ghosts of a past that reappears in the most brutal and cruel way, through the wickedness of an inhuman and unthinkable act, like the violent kidnapping of that sole companion of life.
Thus, the film becomes an obligatory return to the future and the past, an odyssey, with the sole purpose of finding one’s pig.
The film reflects on the consequences of pain and loss, and on the sensations that food can bring back from the depths of the unconscious, restoring memories and easing reservations and hostilities.
In Ratatouille, Anton Ego, until then the villain of the situation, was, through a dormant but never forgotten flavor, brought back to what Ėjzenstejn called "the lost golden age of childhood." In Pig, Adam Arkin, in turn a sort of apparent villain, after tasting again the same food eaten many years earlier with the wife now lost in a dimension foreign to both life and death, will ultimately confess to the protagonist the raw and tragic reality of the facts.
"It is enough for a sound, an odor, already heard and breathed once, to be so again, in the past and present at once, real without being current, ideal without being abstract, for the permanent essence, usually hidden, to be freed, and our true self so long seemed dead, though it wasn’t entirely, wakes up, animates by receiving the celestial nourishment thus brought to him. An instant freed from the order of time has recreated in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time"
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
Though starting from premises and atmospheres very similar to those of John Wick (and the fact that the protagonist finds himself having to return to old acquaintances and the old city of origin, along the "boulevard of memories", somewhat reminiscent of A History of Violence), Pig turns out to be quite different, and it is also a reflection on the things that remain intact in the face of the cyclic earthquakes of time and progress.
Like the beauty of classical music, like the ancestral and fundamentally violent nature of man, like the forest, like the truffle.
A small but truly great film to love and discover.
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