The Flowers of St. Francis (1950)

The Unfamiliar Fragrance of Faith
A Review of Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis
By Francis Joseph Cruz

Francis, rising from prayer, is obviously distraught. His usually calm face is shaking in distress and moist with fresh tears. His prayer, where he lays face down on the ground murmuring “Jesus, nailed on the cross” in between sobs, is more o an act of contrition than a dialogue with God. A leper, his beggarly clothes barely covering the open sores that populate his flesh, walks by. Francis, upon seeing the beggar nearing his spot, covers his face in sadness. He follows the leper and stops to acknowledge him. The leper walks away. He again follows the leper and stops to acknowledge him. The leper walks away. Still undaunted by the repetitive inattention given to him by the leper, he follows him, stops, and embraces the outcast. The leper still walks away, but stops before he gets too far, and looks back at Francis. Francis remains and lays anew among the flowers under the night lighted by his Sister Moon.

The scene described above is merely one of the episodes plucked from The Little Flowers of St. Francis and The Life of Brother Ginepro, two important Franciscan texts that detail the life of the saint and one of his followers, and immortalized into screen by neorealist director Roberto Rossellini in his 1950 masterpiece, Francesco, giullare di Gio (literally translated as Francis, the Jester of God but more popularly known as The Flowers of St. Francis). Filtered from the scene or most of the scenes of the film is the comfort of resolution.

The episodes are mostly portraits of the monks’ daily life, characterized by their childlike naïveté and upright selflessness. In fact, all innocence, humility and goodwill, as exemplified by the leper’s unemotional reaction towards Francis’ act of piety, are often rewarded with indifference, annoyance and violence. The film, narratively unstructured and connected theoretically by an indefinable atmosphere of spiritual serenity, is historically placed between the period of Pope Innocent’s acknowledgement of Francis’ spiritual movement and the period where Francis orders his followers to preach in different parts of the world. With that historical perspective, the film persists as a document of faith, against an overpowering lack of any proof to the existence of a God as professed by the abundance of unkindness despite the dogmatic intervention of the Church.

The film was made during the time Rossellini was publicly decried for having an affair with Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. The two were married to different people, but have met during the filming of Stromboli. Despite the emotional turbulence brought about by the scandal, The Flowers of St. Francis remains almost unnaturally serene. Not only that, Rossellini is a self-professed atheist. However, the film, with its clear and convincing exaltation of faith, is probably one of the most poignant and effective films about a religious figure of all time.

In comparison to the guilt-ridden and arguably hateful excesses of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and the humanizing intimacy of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Rossellini’s film seems inconsequential with its insistence on the mundane, the banal, and the quizzical spiritual implications of such simplicity. Yet, its lack of indulgence, its humility, and concern to the action rather than the effect, postulates the very essence of faith: that it is personal and does not require evidence. Had Rossellini decided to exalt Francis and his monks with the immensity of their work, then its definition of faith would have been compromised, making it less a film and more of a didactic Catholic propaganda.

The film ends with Francis and his monks, after giving away all of their possessions to the poor, decide to part to preach their ways. A monk asks where they should go. Francis tells them to spin until they are dizzy; the direction in which they land will be the direction they should go to and preach. They separate as Rossellini’s camera reveals the sky, calm yet uncertain. Faith is exactly that, calm yet uncertain. The Flowers of St. Francis gains more pertinence in these uncertain times, where faith, despite the ease of claiming possession of it, is an unfamiliar, if not completely rare, fragrance.

(First published in The A/V Club, Philippine Star, 26 March 2010)

Django (1966)

Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

The film's opening has achieved a certain legendary status. Greeted with a sense of prophetic foreboding by an over-the-top song set in the tune of the film's musical score (composed by Luis Enríquez Bacalov), the titular hero (played by Franco Nero) drags a wooden coffin through a muddy valley. Atop a cliff, he witnesses a band of Mexican bandits whipping a prostitute Maria (Loredana Nusciak), before being killed by a separate band of cultic racist soldiers who opt to burn the prostitute in a red-tagged cross instead. Showcasing his nimble fingers and his ability for gunslinging, Django kills each and every one of the girl's tormentor, rescues the girl, and brings her to safety in a ghost town inhabited by prostitutes and their kind-hearted brothel-owner.

Django finds himself in the middle of an ongoing feud between the Mexican vigilantes under General Hugo (José Bódalo), and the cultic gringo army led by Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo). We learn from his trousers and certain hints that Django is a former Yankee soldier who would later turn into a soldier of fortune, using his talents and techniques to gain the amount of gold to leave (or metaphorically bury) the gunslinging Django of old. Furthermore, Django has a history with the respective leaders of the opposing camps. He once saved General Hugo from impending death while Major Jackson killed his wife, while he was away fighting for the Union. Their fates again intertwine in that ghost town. Is there redemption for the morally questionable Django?

Nero's Django is stonecold. He does not afford any hint of emotionality in his exterior, even his striking blue eyes declare a shallowness that prevents character study. Nero's Django is more calculating than anything --- from the start (wherein he drags a prostitute and a coffin to that ghost town) to near the end, everything seems to be a product of his devious plans. Yet upon the unintended passing of fate and destiny, of awkward romanticism, Django's plans fall flat and he has to struggle to again take control of his world.

It is that unintended glance at the anti-hero's humanity that keeps the film riveting. He starts out indestructible; he even becomes more superhuman when he reveals his secret weapon --- yet in a cruel twist of coincidence and accident, he is suddenly left with a choice to die with his conceived plans or to save himself and go with the spirit of the frontier; be swept away by that wind of possible new romance. It's nice in it's simplicity; that spark of hope for the ambiguous Django shines bright in the heap of dead bodies and bullets.

Django is considered as the seminal spaghetti western. It ushered in a horde of sequels (all, except for one, are unrecognized by Sergio Corbucci), and likeminded films. Corbucci, himself, would remain in the genre and would later on craft even better films (like The Great Silence (1968)). Along with Sergio Leone (Corbucci served as assistant director in A Fistful of Dollars (1964)), Corbucci stands as a figurehead for European-made westerns, often considered lesser (described as B-type) equivalents of the American-made ones. Spaghetti westerns are pulpier, more visceral, with characters whose interests are not necessarily indicative of human nature (quite animalistic in fact --- sex, greed, vengeance). In that way, spaghetti westerns forego of those wistful ideologies and virtues of the frontierland and has exchanged it with frank fatalism with blood, violence, and multiplying body counts. Django, even more than Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (although I prefer Leone's film), establishes the staple of the genre.

The Great Silence (1968)

The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)
Italian Title: Il Grande Silenzio

French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, as a favor for the film's producer who turns out to be a good friend, agrees to star in a Sergio Corbucci spaghetti western, with the request that he doesn't memorize any lines for the film. In keeping with the promise, Trintignant plays the film's tragic hero, Silenzio, a mute gunslinger whose vocal cords were removed as a child when he witnesses his parents' deaths by a group of bounty hunters. It becomes his life's mission to rid the Old West of these greedy bounty hunters.

The Great Silence starts with Silenzio riding through a backdrop of white snow while hidden bounty hunters are aiming to assassinate him. With his automatic pistol, he outspeeds his predators, killing each hunter except for one who opts to renege bounty hunting in exchange for his life. Silenzio instead shoots both his hands to assure the promise; in a fit of desperation, the sole survivor tries to shoot the hero with his bloody hands, but is shot by a group of bandits who are holing themselves in the snowy wildnerness of Utah. These bandits are eagerly awaiting the promised amnesty by the new governor, before returning to the town of Snow Hill to lead normal lives. Forced to steal by the involuntary exile, each bandit's head costs a few hundred of dollars; the entire horde is a treasure trove for these greedy bounty hunters traveling the wilderness like ravenous wolves. Most ravenous of them is Tigrero (Klaus Kinski) --- treacherous, morbid, and extremely greedy. He puts to death four bandits including the husband of Pauline (Vonetta McGee), a big-eyed dark beauty who recruits Silenzio to avenge the death of her husband.

The souls of the characters of this western is fueled by greed, vengeance and lust, which makes the romantic heart of the film irresistable and touching. The hearts of Silenzio and Pauline frozen by hate and revenge suddenly melt in a surprising moment, gradually lensed with ponderous close-ups and alluring hues of flesh and yellow by cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti, and backgrounded with a seductive melody composed by Ennio Morricone. During that moment, it felt that the characters transformed from filmic legends, into real characters who, through a sudden gush of emotions, develop humanity and imperfection, getting them closer to mortality. If I may add, I also want to believe that it is probably Silenzio's first real sexual and romantic encounter (his lack of communicative prowess lessens his relational marketability, and his vengeance-consumed soul keeps his mind centered into completing his life's mission), thus suddenly making him very vulnerable.

The film ends in a brutal and cynical note. Its an ending that unshrouds Hollywood-started mythos of the invincibility of the gunslinging hero and the unconquerability of good against patent evil. The way Corbucci depicts the villains (especially Kinski whose mere colden blue-eyed gaze sends shivers down my spine) and the overly-oppressed victims (with the impending idea that a dawn of forgiveness through the governmental amnesty is arriving soon) makes the conclusion even more painful and heartbreaking.

In a way, the cynicism is grounded in visual, thematic and emotional consistency: the neverending snow that hides rifles and corpses, the perpetual cycle of vengeance and violence, the ineptitude and inutile of the law and law enforcers. Everybody is at fault even the film's hero and his love interest, even the dozens of part-time bandits awaiting freedom from their past crimes. When the whole world has been corrupted by by-the-book readings of state-legislated penal laws, and peddling of human lives, it is nature's law that is followed. Silenzio became weak when he fell in love with Paulin, and according to nature, only the strong shall inherit the world.

The Decameron (1971)

The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971)

The Decameron is Pier Paolo Pasolini's first film in his Trilogy of Life, a trilogy of cinematic adaptations of classic collections of stories. Pasolini's adaptation of Boccaccio's collection of stories forgoes of the entire framing of the stories within the context of a group of men and women huddled up in a villa while the rest of Italy is dying from the plague. Instead, Pasolini merely glances upon such historical context (we get glimpses of people suddenly dying without any logical reason why, and corpses abound this film), and instead cooks up his Italian setting as forever sunny, beautiful, and green --- entirely ripe for friendliness turning into treachery, piety into debauchery, sinners into saint, love into lust, and vice versa.

The film starts with Ciappelletto (Franco Citti) bludgeoning a man inside a sack to death, and then drags the corpse and disposes it into the pit. We later learn that Ciappelletto is a hired thug who is used by usurers to force loan payments out of the people, usually with violence. His tale ends with him being sanctified by the high priest for confessing what might seem to be sins of innocence. Then there's the tale of an unfortunate young man whose riches are stolen by a beautiful swindler, and is later on trapped inside an archbishop's tomb, while trying to steal a ruby ring from the adorned corpse. In Pasolini's adaptation of Boccaccio's work, there is no permanence in fortune, or in virtue.

The film also mirrors two portraits of love, differentiated by class. The first one concerns two young lovers who finally meet in the girl's terrace, and make love, only to be discovered by the father who surprisingly acknowledges the two young lovers and blesses them, as long as the rich man marries his daughter. The second one has almost exactly the same plot, but instead of a rich man, we have a laborer who is in love with a girl of higher standing. The girl's brothers discover the laborer's love for the girl and murders him. Two similar stories of youthful romance only differentiated by social class, the results are as different as night and day. Pasolini's Marxist leanings are at work here.

Pasolini himself acts in his film, as a painter commissioned to paint the walls of a cathedral. He goes around town and discerns the faces of the townspeople, looking for inspiration for his tremendous work. In the final stages of his project, he dreams of divinity, where the Virgin Mary is in the center, with a host of angels beside her, and beneath her are the mortals forced into work and debauchery. It is curious to note that in Pasolini's next film, The Canterbury Tales (1972), he would imagine hell, and in Arabian Nights (1974), cook up both paradise and hell in Earth through magic, mysticism, and a cycle of tales. The film ends with the painter celebrating his work but finishes with a line that suggests that the process of dreaming while working is better than the final artwork.

Later on, Pasolini would disavow his Trilogy of Life as his least favorite works mainly because these are pedestrian fare, where commercial success is the result of an abundance of flesh and sex rather than artistry. I'd like to think that Pasolini disavowed the trilogy merely because the process of making them was tremendous in his part, and the success that ensued was not commensurate to his artistic processes, and the commercialization of these films turned them into moneymaking schemes instead of actual artistic products. I disagree, these films are from the first scene of a man violently bludgeoning a debtor trapped in a sack to death, to a young man being reunited with his beloved slave inside a golden palace, are all magnificent works of cinema and in their entirety, a joyful experience to behold.

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.

Arabian Nights (1974)

Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974)
Italian Title: Il fiore delle mille e una notte

Arabian Nights is Pier Paolo Pasolini's final entry to his Trilogy of Life, consisting of filmed adaptations of classic literature, The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972). The films in the trilogy are supposedly Pasolini's least political films, whose main intent is to straightforwardly tell the stories in the film medium without any social or political fuss. The trilogy also shows Pasolini in his most sensual, where his gift for poetry does not merely exist in the beauty of words but in lush colors, exotic locales, and sexual charge. It is said that Arabian Nights is the laurel in the trilogy, as it is the most beautiful and most lyrical of the films. I'd have to agree, Arabian Nights is a towering achievement in storytelling.

The film starts with a young boy purchasing a slave, but eventually falls in love with the slave he bought. The girl is kidnapped and finds herself in a kingdom where she is proclaimed king. The boy then travels all over looking for the girl, and on his way, meets different personalities with different tales. Arabian Nights does not use the literary source's means of telling the story, wherein a princess is tasked to tell stories for a number of nights. Instead, Pasolini celebrates the vibrancy of life by infusing the primary tale with the ability to give birth to different tales. The primary tale gives way to a tale, and a character from that tale, gives way to another tale, and so on, and in the end, everything wraps up beautifully and one gets a dreamy feeling of satisfaction one usually arrives at as a child.

However, Arabian Nights is nowhere near a children's story. It is in fact very graphic in its portrayals of the chosen entries of the literary source. Instead of repeating the stories of Aladdin or Ali Baba, Pasolini chooses the more sexually charged entries and depicts them with a candidness that makes the scenes both unusually magical despite the rawness of the topic. Yet again, Pasolini strays away from magic and religion. Although some of the tales do involve a certain element of mysticism (a demon flying and turning a curious human into a monkey, a metal-plated night being destroyed by a young man who follows a whispered prophecy), such is kept to a minimum and is balanced by a healthy dose of accurate anthropology and cultural diversity Pasolini mastered in the two films (Medea (1969) and Oedipus Rex (1967)) before the trilogy of life. Arabian Nights is delightfully accurate, with Pasolini not limiting his settings to Arabic palaces, deserts, but goes to far-off places like Nepal or Africa, where most of the original tales of the literary source were set.

Arabian Nights is truly a celebration of life for Pasolini. To a certain extent, I can probably declare this as Pasolini's accurate portrayal of his wet dream. The storytelling is vibrant and his visuals are full of bright colors. His characters are young and robust. The boys are laidback and inutile, lazy and oftentimes mainly instructed by hormones instead of intellect. The females are cunning and sly, some are virtuous and some are flirts. When the characters collide, one can easily predict that they will copulate, or at least engage in violent combat. Pasolini does not make room for his usual political discourse, but instead lets the images and the scenery depict his humanity. No wonder Pasolini decided to end his Trilogy of Life with this, a gorgeous and appetizing orgy of man's innate nature to tell stories.

Oedipus Rex (1967)

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)
Italian Title: Edipo re

Oedipus Rex is arguably Pier Paolo Pasolini's most autobiographical film, as he admitted having a longing for his mother, and adversity against his father. For those who take the psychoanalytic theory creatively named after the Greek tragedy seriously, the film may very well be as biographical to them as it was for Pasolini. The film is a straightforward adaptation of Sophocles' play, with a few added Pasolini touches for creative and artistic sake. Gone are the traditionally Greek-inspired costumes, replaced by African masks, less boisterous props, and a setting where the sun bakes the land unforgivingly. Pasolini's curiosity for cultural diversity and anthropological detail would not have reached its heights until Medea (1969).

Franco Citti plays the Greek tragic figure, who was ordered killed by his blue-blooded parents in the fear of the prophecy of the son killing his parents coming true. However, the baby survives and is adopted by the king of Corinth until he turns into an adult, and is hounded by a recurring dream for which he would try to seek answers from the Oracle. The Oracle basically repeats the prophecy: that he will kill his father and he will make love with his mother.

Curiously, Pasolini bookends the adaptation of Sophocles' play with a prologue and an epilogue that is set in contemporary times. The prologue is basically a staging, or more accurately, a filming of the psychological concept in action: a young boy's adversity towards his father, a military officer, for taking his mother away and stealing his mother's affections from him. The prologue hasn't anything much to say. The filmmaking is standard Pasolini, straightforward and sometimes lingering to idle poetry. Yet, it doesn't work until the film shifts to primitive times, where emotions aren't dressed and protected with modern ideas of propriety and ethics.

The Oedipus Pasolini presents is no Greek hero, but more of a cheat, a primal specimen of the naked id. Once aware of the prophecy, it is the id which gains control (although, it always seems to be that case, the competitive Oedipus cheats in discus-throwing and makes a dastardly effort to prove himself). The highest point of Pasolini's psychotic Oedipus is when his pride was damaged by a traveling king (his father, but he doesn't know that yet). Like a coward, he runs to save his skin, but a mysterious force keeps on urging him to stop and fight it out, until finally, he reaches to his father's throat and slits it. Pasolini's filmmaking here is intense. He shoots against the light, with the swordfights usually blanketed by the sun's glare, an imagery gesturing a heated and uncontrolled impulse.

Oedipus' biological mother is played by Silvana Mangano, who is a welcome presence against Citti's lack of middle range in acting (he either screams and shrieks in anger or is comatose in unlively scenes). Mangano's Jocasta is regal, seductive, controlled, beautiful yet unmaternal. As a mother, she is uncaring and almost negligible but as a lover, she reminds me of a playful and less conniving Lady Macbeth. The incest is played matter-of-factly, I have this impression that Pasolini's talent is portraying sex as a fact of life, its emotional or moral implications furthered by what the audience knows of its backgrounds. Here, the sex is primitive, with Oedipus switching from son to lover in uneasy gestures and variations of kissing, finally withdrawing to the wishes of the id, to make love.

The film ends with the character of Oedipus being transported into contemporary times, blind and guided by a young boy. He plays his flute underneath two imposing figures: a Catholic cathedral, and then, an industrial factory. This might be Pasolini's Marxist philosophies at work - a push against faith, and a push forward to the everyman. I really don't know, as the film's ending is far too opaque for deliberation, and symbolisms like these are far too obvious and blatant that it will belittle my little liking of Pasolini's adaptation of Oedipus Rex.

Tickets (2005)

Tickets (Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami & Ken Loach, 2005)

Perhaps the most overused metaphor for life is that it is like a journey: people hop in and out, bumps and unexpected occurences happen, and lastly, there will always be an arrival notwithstanding any unexpected stoppage of that journey. Tickets does not exactly use the train ride as a metaphor for life, but simply as setting for a triptych of character examinations which seemingly sum up in an obvious suggestion that train tickets represent an accepted social divide the characters in the film will have to act or react on.

The film begins with Italian Ermanno Olmi's piece, a rather inert tale about a pharmaceutical intellectual (Carlo de Piani), who develops an infatuation for the company secretary whose hospitality and sense of care has struck the old intellectual as a rejuvination of his life's light. He struggles while writing an email of gratitude to the lovely assistant, daydreaming of candlelit dinners inside his first class coach, when a row of military men suddenly invade and with their brash rudeness, interrupt the old man's fantasies. This wakes up the old man who notices a family of refugees standing in the border between the first class coach and the lower class coach, and their milk for the baby spilt by the constant opening of the coach doors. He orders a warm milk, stands up, and delivers his milk to that family.

Once the intellectual alights the train, a couple stubbornly hops in and looks for available comfortable seats. This is the start of Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's segment. The fat old lady (Silvana de Santi) finally gets a seat in the first class coach, after which, her companion (Filippo Trojano) coyly asks if he can go to the restroom. We are not aware of the exact relationship between the two. The younger man seems to show a distant respect towards the older woman, like a scared child to a strict mother, but the older woman seems to be too disconnected, too shrewd in her ways to the young man, hinting of something more like the young man being paid to serve her. The young man is used, abused, and finally explodes in fury, and leaves the older woman to fend for herself in her dead husband's memorial service.

Last is British filmmaker Ken Loach's segment, about a group of rowdy young football fans who are going to Rome to watch their team play the championship. A dilemma arises when one of their train tickets is stolen by the Albanian family (the same family the pharmaceutical intellectual helped by delivering a warm glass of milk), and the kids are faced with the decision of turning in the family of refugees or donating the ticket, the obvious repercussions of the decision being the refugee would either be sent to prison, or riding the train for free, respectively.

Unlike most other omnibus films, where the tying bond between the segments is a similar theme or a genre, Tickets is more of a seamless collaboration between the three auteurs in generating a full feature film that tackles human relationships within a tightly classed environment such as the European train line. The directors pass off their chair in fluid fashion, with no need for segment titles, or differences in style (the differences mostly consist of the language spoken, the depth of the segment, and of course, the quality). If one is forced to compare the three segments, the weakest would be Olmi's since it is far too inert, inactive, and the object of affection of the main character, too weakly construed.

The high point of the triptych is Kiarostami's segment, a delightfully humorous observation of a lady who is unwilling to let go of a former grandeur and dignity that is suddenly dissolved by the death of her husband, an army general. She literally forces things her way, and mostly gets away with it. Loach's segment is the typical Loach film, with an obvious heart for the working class, and a bigger heart for the oppressed. He ends the film in a jovial note, which is all good, since Tickets, wonderful celebration of the world's three truest auteurs' works, and putting them together in one feature, is pure unadulterated joy.

Medea (1969)

Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's adaptation of the tale of Greek mythological sorceress Medea starts with Jason growing up under the guidance of a centaur. Pasolini unbears his themes right there in the beginning. Jason, as an infant, listens to the half man, half horse telling his fate, his Greek genealogy, and then just discards everything as boring banter. Jason grows up and the centaur looks much more normal, a talkative sage instead of a mystic mythological humanoid. He prepares the adult Jason (Giuseppe Gentile) to face his quest and regain his throne from his usurping uncle. The uncle then sends him to retrieve the magical golden fleece from a foreign land after which the uncle would freely give up the kingdom to the returning heir.

Medea (Maria Callas) is a priestess in a foreign land. She helps Jason retrieve the golden fleece and runs off with him, falling in love with the brute Greek, and bearing him two children. Jason leaves the foreign priestess to marry the daughter of the King of Corinth. Medea, passionate and vengeful, offers her priestly robes, causing the Corinthian princess to burn. As a final act of vengeance to Jason, she murders his two children. Pasolini does not stray far from the age old tale, but completely revamps the mythological aspects, choosing a setting more archaelogically, or at least anthropologically accurate, or creative, and setting his Marxist principles at work.

A Greek tale is almost impossible without the accompanying tinge of mysticism, of a reliance to the machinations of the elemental gods that duly guide the Greek heroes and villains to their respective places in history. Pasolini throws everything out the window. Mysticism is transformed into ritualistic processes, and the dieties' presence merely bestowed from Pasolini's cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri's clever use of natural lighting in invoking the divine and the otherworldly. Pasolini wraps the film with an atmosphere of earthliness, despite the fact that the tale is that of myth and of gods. Chants, rhythmic drumbeats, or Japanese songs accompanied by string instrument strummings complete the anthropological notion of the multi-racial world of the Mediterranean. Nothing magical ever happens, nor gods never materialize in the human world. The only instances of mysticism happen when Jason is an infant, and a toddler and sees his mentor as half-man and half-horse, and when Medea, plotting his revenge, cooks up her plan in the only way she knows how, as a priestess receiving divine intervention from the sun, and her vengeance culminating in a magical fiery demise of the king and the princess.

Intead, Pasolini's thrust is provided by human instincts. The vengeance does not end with the magical robe burning both princess and king, but with the princess ending her life in sorrowful anguish, and the king following as an endnote to all suffering. There is still a sense of ceremonial respect, with the infanticide happening as a ritual, instead of a passionate act of insanity. Medea calling her children, one by one, to take a bath, and sleep, and she then stabs them with an intricately designed dagger, and sending them to their silent deaths. It's deeper that way, and paints a portrait of a woman lost in a world whose gods are logic, ritual and rationality.

Medea is a tragic figure: a woman plucked from a society whose reliance on magic keeps her needed and worthy and then transported to a society that has rightfully forgotten its ancient, primitive traditions in the guise of human progress, and finally forgotten by the man who she has given everything up for. Pasolini draws the line and alludes ancient Greece to present society: a society of progress where religion and the reliance to the divine is of no use. The tragedy of Medea being the tragedy of the everyman whose reliance to faith and religion is as pathetic as the sorceress unable to grasp progress.