Deliverance (1972)

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

It's probably a mixture of spite and irreverence that persuaded me to spend a little less than two hours of this year's Valentine's Day to watch John Boorman's Deliverance, an unsympathetic account of four suburbanites tragic canoing trip in hillbilly country. It's the proper film to suck any notion of what Valentines invokes --- the proper panacea for those feeling antagonistically unromantic while the rest of the world is sizzling with love.

The four men arrive in a make-shift gas station and while waiting for their station wagons to refill with fuel, Drew (Ronny Cox) starts playing his guitar, attracting a deformed youngster to challenge his strumming with his very own banjo renditions. It's an arresting scene; both absurd and lovely --- a defining image of an uncomfortable marriage between the city slickers and the country bumpkins (the 'Dueling Banjoes' song naturally urged the natives to break into a dancing fit, as the tourists get amused out of the weirdness of it all). The scene, and the succeeding sequences of peaceful canoing are illusionary portrayals of an uneasy calm before the traumatic turn-around: two horny mountain men successfully sodomize insurance salesman Bobby (Ned Beatty) and attempt to similarly encroach on the masculinity of Ed (Jon Voight) before being foiled by the group's bow and arrow-wielding alpha-male Lewis (Burt Reynolds).

Deliverance is a film that is totally devoid of any depiction of romantic love. In fact, love isn't merely absent but the exact opposite of it pervades the air. Deliverance's central imagery concerns the act of rape; not only in its more obvious (when one of the mountainmen asks Bobby to squeal like a pig, while raping him) but also in its symbolic form. It's interesting how it's not only the city folks that were invaded, but also the serenity of a river and its denizens. From the start, an unamicable relationship between the Atlanta-based group and the backwoods is felt. Lewis lording it over as the leader of the pack; the rest of the gang try to regain or push forward their machismo. It is when an act of violation of that struggle for natural dominance occurs (the rape scene and the river's angry act of revenge with the terrible rapids that kills one of them) that the cycle of violence surfaces. Nature gets back at the agents of human expansion and shows them who's boss.

Rape is the most incongruent of acts --- it uses a method reserved for love-making but is fuelled by the basest of human emotions (hate, lust, vengeance, selfishness). The four urbanites' weekend in the river can be perceived as a rape in itself; an unwelcome entrance, and their respective reactions from the excitement of being victorious in conquering the initial rapids of the river, orgasmic in the sense that they achieve the goal of rape, which is dominating over the victim. It is also interesting that the method of the hunt is through a bow and arrow --- the image of an arrow piercing a mountain man, an appropriate vengeful response to the similarly graphic invasion that was done to them.

Even the reactions by the urbanites to the depraved act is comparable to those victimized by rape, a mixture of the need for retribution and a total whitewash of the act. The convenience of the river being drowned by the construction of a dam almost settles the score, forever burying the remnants of the hellish weekend. Yet the psychological effects persist; the knowledge, the guilt, the shock remain indelible portions of their lives (as shown by the concluding dream image of a corpse hand surfacing out of the lake). It seems that the struggle for dominance between urban development and the depicted backward country life and nature should end with the cycle by that final act of invasion (and rape) of flooding the entire river, yet it doesn't.

I thought Deliverance is probably one of the most truthful, painful and scathing cinematic depictions of rape, within a setting void of any tired notions of classical romanticism. Both its symbolic and its more visceral portrayal of the act are appropriated with real destructive repercussions against masculine dignity and that fairy tale-notion of urban dominance.

*****
This post is my contribution to 100 films: The Lovesick Blog-A-Thon.

The Canterbury Tales (1972)

The Canterbury Tales (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1972)
Italian Title: I Racconti di Canterbury

The Canterbury Tales, Pier Paolo Pasolini's middle entry to his Trilogy of Life (also consisting of cinematic adaptations of The Decameron (1971) and Arabian Nights (1974)) won the Golden Bear, the top prize in the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. Obviously, it is an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer's beloved collection of tales as told by different travelers who are in a pilgrimege to the English town of Canterbury. Chaucer's work is supposedly telling of morality in both serious and humorous ways, but Pasolini decides to withdraw from Christian morality and use the tales as fervent attacks on religious institutions. Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales may very well be deemed blasphemous as religious symbols are pitted against acts of amorality, where holy men are shown as greedy, where the only language understood is that of sexual appetite and avarice. Yet, despite Pasolini's strategy of overblowing the more libidous aspects of Chaucer's tale, the adaptation remains to be faithful, which is quite a feat.

The Canterbury Tales may be the most pedestrian of Pasolini's films. Humor is mostly achieved through unsavory methods, and Pasolini does not shy away in graphically detailing his comedy. We are forced witnesses of several pissing, farting, adulterous sexual acts, and much much more. Yet, despite Pasolini's questionable methods, the film still feels grounded and does not let its boisterous values to drown its storytelling roots. Moreover, the film does give a certain notion that Hollywood does not have a patent as to making use of farts, piss, and other bathroom matters as sources for cinematic humor, Pasolini was way ahead, and did it much better.

What The Canterbury Tales lacks is a form or structure. Although Pasolini tries to provide for a logical continuation of the tales, by beginning the film with a tavern encounter, and showing little glimpses of Geoffrey Chaucer (played by Pasolini) working on the compilation, most of the tales are randomly stringed together without a clue or a guess how they are supposedly linked. It's probably Pasolini making use of the literary source's given popularity that he decided to forgo of formalities and just see the tales cinematically told in whatever manner. The randomness somewhat works, but Pasolini showed how good a storyteller he can be with Arabian Nights were the tales flawlessly spring forth like infants from other tales. Here, the storytelling is erstwhile interesting, but mostly dull.

While the film as a whole is good, the parts are of various quality. "The Cook's Tale" turns into an annoying Chaplinesque slapstick comedy with one of Pasolini's frequent actor prancing around town with a bowler's hat and a stick, inviting trouble all around, and ending his fate while atrociously chanting in a very annoying manner. "The Miller's Tale" is deliriously obscene. The last tale is visually and nightmarishly inventive, with friars being farted out of Satan's red buttocks in outright comedic fashion.

The Canterbury Tales is one of those films you'd either love or hate. I'm one of those who thought that it's brave filmmaking, that Pasolini's irreverent rendition of Chaucer's tales of piety and morals is not done out of bad taste but with a primal passion for portraying man as creatures of desire, and desires as weapons for violence and trickery. Others hated it, and I really can't blame them. The literary source is a revered tradition, taught in different schools from around the world, and is considered as England's most important contribution in world literature. That its cinematic adaptation is this raunchy, oftentimes obscene, and even rather plainly photographed feature is a mighty hard stab to the enriched tradition of Chaucer's work.