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Rating: "Everyone in Rome talks about death."
And here we are. Finally, the mystery of my name, Caspasian, is revealed! I realize that "you couldn't care less" but the holder of this name is one of the protagonists of the film, a role portrayed as a true "piece of shit," sharp, cutting, intelligent but... snake-like, opportunistic, calculating, arrogant, a backstabber without shame. Caspasian: a dickface in a double-breasted suit.
In short, quite a character with the sound of a name that immediately attracted me, projecting me into the sacred mountainous areas of Ararat, and because my essence is on the opposite spectrum of the subject in question (even if this latest incarnation of mine manifested in Rome), it was quickly and mystifyingly adopted by someone like me, passionate about ancient oriental carpets, especially Caucasian, who occasionally sells an old shirwan, buchara, heritz found in some bazaar in Prague and loves to let in his head melodies like: "Atelier Caspasian - Archaic Carpets and, when needed, flying..."
But enough with vain deliriums, let us immerse ourselves in a challenging exercise like tackling a product of Peter Greenaway, even more so if it's "The Belly of an Architect" where the cheeky Welsh director in 1987 further sublimates previous attempts, offering us a vision of things close to absolute zero. Sharp as a butcher's knife, dear Peter progresses throughout the film weaving hidden situations and succeeds in capturing sensations and moods, often renouncing the canonical image which he transforms into an inner image. Long live that! Life, consumption, and deaths are brought to us in a way I would call subliminal. A massacre of centuries-old tangles for a psychic deflagration that accelerates all the "cancers" at play.
And what do we have in the background? A caput mundi offered to us not with the promiscuity of a pseudo "great beauty" but captured in its original dress made of impersonal ferocity. Rome is like that; it doesn't call and doesn't wait for anyone, it devours everything, a cloaca of consciences reflecting the invisible of yourself that you don't want to accept. Relentless in revealing your miseries as the director is relentless in not granting any common cinematic foothold: the story is the background and Rome is the protagonist, always and eternally, with those drapes, among the columns of the Vittoriano, that capriciously reveal and hide the "ruins," moved by the obscene wind of the millennia.
Greenaway strips the feral equanimity of Rome as Rome indiscriminately strips everyone. The man from Newport urges us to engage in esoteric training to be able to grasp the nuances, the subtle variations, the imperceptible vibrations that determine the perfect picture of "the state of things," that "everything happens" where we don't realize we're being made mincemeat for other entities. That Chicago slaughterhouse told at the table by diners, at those dinners and lunches proposed beyond the biblical, that is minor compared to the slaughterhouse of the Urbe: in the Roman slaughterhouse, they haven't worked real meat for centuries, now blood has become a specter.
Stourley Kracklite, born in Chicago, Illinois, is part of the Western hemisphere "of which Rome is not a part..." Greenaway doesn't film Rome; he is Rome. His annihilating and unconditional surrender to the city opens the doors to silent revelation: Rome destroys you by showing you that you cannot live with life, and Greenaway is well trained in this truth. The images the director extracts flatter the Entity allowing some of its shadows to be discovered. And compared to revealing the secrets of the body through decay, mutilations, open organs, and various probes of past and future films never like on this one, Greenaway finds the path (the only one to follow) of transcendence: the shadow of death is more dangerous than death itself and resides near the Tiber.
The deviant awareness of the architect is filtered through his consciousness of inflicting aware suffering on himself that through pain, makes possible the glimpse of the invisible: "Do you sleep well, architect? Not since I arrived in Rome..." And it is here that incommunicability takes a path of no return, it's inevitable... If you can perceive a bit of the invisible surrounding us and others can't, the fracture is consequential, but those who make the leap then have to cope with other types of fractures, internal, definitive. Exclusion from the exhibition and, in fact, from life is being removed from the conformism where everyone wallows, beyond solitude caresses you and accompanies you into no-return. The drama experienced by the architect thus reaches us aseptically.
The camera's immobility finally annuls the cinematic deception of movement, filming the moods of bodies with an agenda with an appointment with nothingness. So that Kracklite’s final solution appears plausible to us as the only escape from the cul-de-sac arranged by divine designs. A conscious sacrifice, a demonstration of detachment from the biological vehicle where its cravings are diverted and derailed towards the pathological. Here's the magic word: being in the pathological to be "masterpieces," it doesn't matter if the road to this is bloody and self-destructive. Rome is masterpiece because it is forever pathological.
But in the end, we're made of human flesh, and flesh must be aged as much as possible to face the waves of the unconscious, to seek the point of no return. Let's use ourselves within the limits of divine laws and give up, as Kracklite suggests with his agitated acceptance of destruction. Let's make life the gym to disintegrate the misleading ego through renunciation of the tangible, drugging the soul with a run-up to failure, integrating within us the mockery that engulfs us by deliberately choosing the ongoing jest towards ourselves, abandoning poses and ceaselessly slapping ourselves to uproot the induced thoughts and land in non-thought, accepting all the bile that, if deprived of consideration, is nothing but honey. The architect can do nothing but communicate with Étienne-Louis Boullée (1729-1799) with a cross-sectional epistolary that annuls space-time but that turns out coherent in the form of a pictured postcard, given that the distance with earthly counterparts has become unbridgeable.
The preservation of life-consume-death by the system delivers the final blow: mors tua, vita mea. The belly as a simulacrum of life, as a receptacle of burns and various decays, as an echo of a Roman cuisine made of offal, as a wine skin that hides gastritis, colics, ulcers, cholesterols, and as a transformer of vital energy into blood. The temple of man, the belly, stands as the protagonist, and it all starts from everyone's "stomachs" where the digestion of human miseries creates a noise that amplifies the deception we're subjected to. The navel becomes the center to place a compass that draws a "large ring road" of eternal returns.
To escape the ephemeral, the price is inevitably high and is inversely proportional to the temptations that lead to perdition, especially if the playing field is the Capital. "See Naples and then die," at least the Neapolitan city leaves a token before the end, Rome does not, impassively it shows itself only if already passed over. Wim Mertens’ music fits perfectly and flatters the immobility of travertine, probing, with Glenn Branca’s intervention, the unfathomable, the shadows of Emperors walk with us.
And it reminds me of the joke about the American who comes to Rome and each monument he sees he asks the Roman guide how long it took to build, always countering that in America it would take "much less time." But upon arriving at the Colosseum, our seasoned guide responds to the usual challenging question with: "This? I don't know, yesterday it wasn't here..." And Caspasian, when asked what he thinks of the architect's wife, replies: "Nothing, she doesn't think. Poor thing, she's American." Kracklite even unknowingly, as a good pioneer, accepts and challenges the Eternal City but the mephitic boomerang of the Capital never spares: the first times you try to stick your head out of the "cave" it gets inexorably chopped off.
The eventual Martian coming down to Earth will be welcomed with wonder and curiosity everywhere, but by the time he presents himself in Rome, he will be "dried" by the first Roman he encounters with a: “Hey Martian... make us laugh...” The Speckler family embodies the endless decay of the Urbe, Flavia turns out to be the most ancient figure, even suspected of hermaphroditism: "Your sister worries me, she's even more rapacious than you," Louise points out to Caspasian. Rome first intoxicates you then delivers its final blow with a kind of parthenogenesis between Louise and the energy of the place, with the request for fresh life from the birthing woman at the Vittoriano during the exhibition opening, in unison with the ritual sacrifice of the now-tender ex-husband who with the "backward dive," executed just upon hearing the cry of his firstborn, accepts defeat.
He realized it when he suffers the condemnation of release from the police: "That's all, you may go." The blessing for the suicide is sealed: always better to end it by the hand of a millennial entity rather than succumbing to a current psychosomatic illness. And the traditional masks of ancient theater become endless photocopies of the abdomens of illustrious figures scattered like paving in the act of "asphalting" the deception of life. And thus, the rituals required by "the rule of the game" are fulfilled, the orgy of blood, semen, and redemption is consumed.
On the other shore, the "enemy" Caspasian has free field because he was born and lived in the eternity of the Latin polis and knows how and when to lean on the city's whims by placating them with indifferent libations: he is the absolute winner on the material field. But on the front of the unresolved cause-effect law, the situation is not exactly clear. We can't blame him, being born and living in Rome entails unpredictable and, in many cases, devastating side effects.
And how are you set? Are you satisfied with your little garden imposed from the outside? Do you mind your own "business"? Judge sitting on your couch? Continue to feed on Hollywood plastic? Want no problems? If so, best wishes to everyone, soon, for a good subcutaneous anxiety-relieving microchip (?). Cheers!.
Those three heads laid on the crystal table in the house-studio of Flavia, Caspasian's sister, are the spirit of Rome. The adjacent little room where photos of the unaware protagonists are hung is the final slaughterhouse, here are the true "Roman holidays": Boullée, Newton, Augustus, Hadrian, Andrea Doria, Pantheon, EUR, Forum, the fig pyramid, the "writing machine," Caracalla's baths, Ostia, the bells, the "cuppolone," chapels, poison, ruins, catacombs, offal, saltimbocca, pajata, Rome, Rome, Rome, Rome, Rome, Rome, ROME, TO US!
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