Tinto Brass
Io, Caligola

Tinto Brass-Io, Caligula (1979)

"When freedom becomes liberticide and when moral values fade away, then civilizations decline, logical no?" Who knows if the historical Caligula ever uttered such a phrase... I believe he did, I find it very relevant, and placed point-blank at the beginning of this tormented film it has the tone of a lucid prophecy on the endless decay of humanity always in the hands of madmen. The last erotomaniac peplum is a cult film, visionary, kitsch, a Fellinian-Satyricon circus and a political satire on power, slashed by censorship, shot and then disowned by Brass himself who abandoned the set due to various differences with the production by Bob Guccione of "Penthouse" - who also inserted extra hardcore scenes shot by himself. In the end, it's a bit punk, this Caligula played by McDowell, son of '77, the year it first came out, only to be immediately disavowed by screenwriters Gore Vidal and D'Amico, seized and then shown here and there in Italy in November '79, screened in its full hardcore version at the Cannes festival, and then re-edited and shortened in 1984 by Franco Rossellini for theaters and VHS.

The money and the chicks available were plenty, the cast was even stellar: Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, Paolo Bonacelli, Leopoldo Trieste, Adriana Asti, the acting is amateurish, despite the violent and orgiastic backdrop with McDowell who in the most touching and dramatic scenes acts as if he were playing Brutus - Marlon Brando in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar. Despite the apparent disavowal, the soul of Brass, vitellonesque and sybaritic, is recognizable in several great visual insights of the film: like a curious teenager, for the national Tinto the camera is a keyhole through which to spy at the buttocks.

Thus, this cinematic transfer - psychological in the hagiographic story of Caligula, is essentially a vitellonesque projection on the child emperor, who holds the world like a toy: until he goes mad, at the start of his reign the prince behaves worthily. Tiberius' rigor had ended, and the new Caesar increased gifts to soldiers and the plebs, promulgated several amnesties, loosened censorship. Yes, he had the vice of loving his sister Drusilla Egyptian-style, but with renewed moral rigor he expelled from the order of knights for their misconduct, and granted with exile from death by drowning all the porno actors-who had entertained Tiberius in the leisure of Capri.
So at a certain point, as the tradition of senatorial origin wants, and according to two sources, both hostile by Suetonius and Dio Cassius, a sudden change occurred in him due to meningitis: the period of his madness began, with the killing of Tiberius' nephew, Gemellus, the posthumous divinization of his sister-lover Drusilla, the infamous military campaigns, the Germanic and the British, and a whole series of atrocities, orgies, excesses, and oddities, like forcing the senate to accept the presence of his horse Incitatus, or wanting to be applauded as an histrionic charioteer, singer, musician, and even dancer, with that dry rhythm that anticipated modern dances by centuries.

One of the most poetic scenes of Brass: the camera imagines the young Caligula sick with nostalgia and absolute, feeling like a god, raising his arms to the sky towards the distant and serene Moon, imagining feeling her mystically in embrace with him. How to blame his Promethean desire to unite with the cosmic femininity, the Moon-Isis, once and for all; Isis who would restore sanity and recompose the pieces of a shattered mind like Osiris, like in a white, total and definitive filmic masturbation that no human film could ever give? Who among us, at least once, between the "longing for the absolute" and the lack of a sense that transcends the world, as a youth has never said I want the moon...