christopher-n-robinson

Guy (our potential hero) drives back home fatigued and either hits a young woman at the side of the road or perhaps not. She has a friend who is so stupid she thinks artificial resuscitation by the hero is an attempt at murder. At this point she runs off into the countryside, fearful for her life. Our hero, with a possibly dying passenger in his car, forgets all about getting her to hospital and instead runs all around back roads trying to find the stupid friend. WTF. Why for gods sake??? . Just stupid.

Pasolini has created a more serious and complex version of the 1930's classic "Boudu Saved From Drowning" in which a mysterious figure descends on a household of bourgeois people in Milan, a household whose members struggle with all sorts of psychological and religious issues. In this case we have no idea who the mystery person is, indeed the family just seem to accept him. Over the course of the film the stranger manages to have sexual and loving relationships with everyone from the maid to the father of the household. The young son struggling with homosexuality, the maid caught up in a virginal religious state, a besotted young teen daughter, the mother with unfulfilled sexuality and the father struggling with his bourgeois attitudes to human capital and homophobia. The stranger disappears as mysteriously as he arrived and the family goes into a perverse decline, other than the son who becomes an artist influenced by Francis Bacon, the English artist who represented many homosexual images of his own relationships in his striking art (as seen in a book featured in the movie). Each member seems to have been touched by some strange religious experience, left to come to terms with their perversions and fears. The film is often seen as representing the trans-formative act of religion with some being touched by the hand of god and others continuing their worst attitudes and behaviour. The father leaves his factory to his workers, the teen goes into a catatonic state, the maid becomes a healer and mystic destined for an unusual death, the son a talented artist and the mother increasingly and uncontrollably lustful despite constant religious images impinging on her senses. The father symbolically casts off all bourgeois elements by stripping naked in public. Video references keep crossing to some strange desert landscape, whose meaning only becomes apparent at the end like some scene from hell. What is often ignored is the camera-work which is often tracking across the top of many scenes almost as if it is searching for some truth. Really an amazing movie requiring a lot of work and thought from the viewer.