Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Mariam Mansuryan It really helps when you know the myth of Oedipus. You understand the story much better and can more easily follow the stages of madness of Oedipus.For Greeks, it was not a dishonor to make fun of their Gods, as many did in comedies. But it certainly was a dishonor not to recognize their power. The Gods were so powerful for the Greeks that they could tell you their horrific prophecies and you would still have the same fate despite this. I think the work really encapsulated all of Greek theatre in it. There were people in masks and crowds representing the chorus that in a hidden way was the protagonist narrator of the story back BC. There was a protagonist in his hero's journey and the story was practically the same.One difference was how Pasolini blended the modern times with the antiquity of Greece. Truly amazing how the film starts and end by the same sequence: spinning around, looking up at the treetops, and end with the finite horizon of the green valley. This shows that even though the times have changed and now instead of carriages people travel in cars, and even though Oedipus is not truly blind, nothing has really changed. It's the same journey in the hero's head.This also very strongly links with Pasolini's Porcile (Pigsty) for me. The same combination of modernity and antiquity to begin with, however there, the world is parallel. I would even go as far as to say that Julian was none else but Oedipus. He says he killed his father, ate human flesh and is still full of joy. So was Oedipus. He was full of joy at the end, when he was blind, couldn't see anything and wanted to hear nothing, he didn't belong in this world.Another striking similarity is the carriage that appears in both these films. There is a certain irony in that too because in Porcile there are three women following the carriage instead of men, but still, nothing is different. And Julian still kills his father, that is what his modern self is referring to. And when I was reviewing Porcile, I wasn't sure what the pigs represented. But now I think I know. The pigs are the chorus, the Gods or the society. The pigs are the silent narrators of the story yet again.The portrayal of modern man in both those films is very similar too. He's lost, as if he lives in the past reality and is consumed by the business of the modern world. Deep inside he is still the same man, the same hero undergoing the same journey. The boy is not actually eaten by pigs, but rather hung from the cross in Porcile. And Oedipus truly does lose his sight despite having eyes. There is even a certain feeling that fate is truly predisposed before a child is even born.Another motif in both those films was the musical instrument. In Procile, father of Julian plays the harp that seems to be controlling the world with his Nazi German magic wand. In Rex, Oedipus plays the reedpipe, and I noticed that the sound of this reedpipe recurs through the entire movie many times. It's like all those people are music that a god or gods control, and they don't even know about it.Overall a really cool film, I liked most of the things about it.

chaos-rampant Another marvelous film by Pasolini.No one is as cinematically intense as this man, but it's not an ordinary intensity he affects. It does not result from the withholding of narrative or visual information, it is not primarily a dramatic intensity; Lean, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, all did some terrific work in that external mode where we see the struggling human being in the cleanly revealed world of choices and fates. Pasolini works his way around all that, starting with one of the most archetypal stories. Here we have anticipation, foreknowledge as fate. And of course there is some dramatic intensity in this and others of his films, but that's not what makes him special. He can create heightened worlds that we experience with a real intensity. It goes back to that film movement called Neorealism which thrived in postwar Italy, where the utmost goal was to soak up a more human, more universal conflict as we staggered through broken pieces of the world.Looking back now it seems stale, we have a much more refined sense of what is real, we can see the conceit of the camera. But two filmmakers emerged from out of this movement who did work in a more radical direction, moving the images closer to perception. Antonioni is one of the greatest adventures in film. Pasolini is the other. The larger point with him is to have an intensely spiritual experience of a whole new storyworld, to that effect he selects myths that we have more or less fixed notions about how they should be (this, Medea, his Gospel film) and films them to have invigorating presence in the now.Every artistic choice in the film reflects that; the dresses, the swords, the landscapes, the faces, it's all intensely unusual to what you'd expect from Greek myth, seemingly handcarved to be from a preconscious world outside maps and time. The camera also reflects that; he could have plainly asked of a fixed camera and smooth, fixed traveling shots from his crew, but evidently he wants that warm lull of the human hand. It's a different sort of beauty, not in some painted image but in our placement in evocative space.When Oedipus visits the oracle at Delphii, we do not have sweeping shots of some ornate marble structure as you'd expect in a Hollywood film. A congregation of dustcaked villagers is gathered in a clearing before a group of trees, the oracle is a frightening old crone attended by slender boys in masks. The roads are dusty, interminable ribbons dropped by absent-minded gods. A Berber village in Morocco stands for ancient Thebes. Sudden dances. Silvana Mangano. And those headgear! It's all about extraordinariness in the sense of moving beyond inherited limits of truth.It works. This is a world of divinity, causal belief, and blind seeing into truth that even though it was fated, we discover anew in the sands.The sequence where a feverish Oedipus confronts his father at the crossroads will stay with me for a long time, the running, the sun, the distance where tethers are pulled taut.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx This tale of Oedipus starts off and ends in the twentieth century, though for the most part is set in a primitive version of ancient Greece. There is not much rational connection between the stories, but Pasolini manages to forge himself a free pass on that one. Whilst the Oedipus Complex theme of the first story is meant to be taken quite literally, and is basically autobiographical, the middle story, recognisably Sophoclean, is more, in my opinion, meant to be about an angry confused man who cannot stomach his fate nor confront truths about his identity. As both sections do genuinely feel autobiographical they knit together just fine.The first section of the film set in the 1920s is the best piece of filming I have seen from Pasolini and made me really excited. There's a wide open scene of children running off around a playing field on a hot piercing day, one of those thick childhood days when the emotions battened down the hatches on squire intellect. I was reminded very much of an Edith Sitwell poem (Green Flows the River of Lethe - O): "I stood near the Cities of the Plains / And the young girls were chasing their hearts like the gay butterflies / Over the fields of summer - / O evanescent velvets fluttering your wings / Like winds and butterflies on the Road from Nothing to Nowhere!" The sentiment all the more surprisingly apt given that the second part of the film is shot in what could be the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah (the Cities of the Plains) for all we know.The rage of Oedipus, which occurs frequently in the movie could be liked to another part of the poem: "But in the summer drought / I fled, for I was a Pillar of Fire, I was destruction / Unquenched, incarnate and incarnadine // I was Annihilation / Yet white as the Dead Sea, white as the Cities of the Plains / For I listened to the noontide and my veins / That threatened thunder and the heart of roses." Part of Pasolini's drive for shooting the films seems to be to continue his fascination with ancient buildings and ruins which he demonstrated three years earlier in his superb 1964 documentary The Walls of Sana'a for which he travelled to Yemen.The end of the playing field scene features Jocasta suckling Oedipus. She gazes directly at the camera and thus the audience for a long period, in which she goes through a range of emotions, including what could be arousal, followed by disquiet, which ultimately turns into a distanced understanding. For me this is cinematically equivalent to the Mona Lisa, which is also a gay man's meditation on his mother, greatly cryptic yet provocative, set in against a natural backdrop.Silvana Mangano, who plays the mother in both parts of the movie (and would star in Pasolini's Teorema the following year), carries a lot of it. Her beauty, her alabaster skin and wispy eyebrows, her perfectly tangled plaits (which would send Fuseli to his knees), are commanding. She has an artistic skill that eclipses that of Franco Citti (Oedipus) and Ninetto Davoli (Thebes' crier) quite totally. Franco Citti's lack of skill, whilst occasionally infuriating in the context of the story (his is not the demeanour of a king) do however lend the film a level of authenticity, given the primary motive of this sequence, which was to demonstrate a pained adolescent fury and denial, which was ignorant at its base.There's an unusual device of writing characters' thoughts in black lettering on a white background, which doesn't quite work but which would be far better than the presumable alternative of camera-faced soliloquies.Some of the locations in the movie felt truly dream-like to me, for instance the unkempt walled piazza-garden of Jocasta, the crumbled ruin where Oedipus meets a naked adolescent girl on his peregrinations, the mountainous areas between cities.The props in the movie are cheap and fantastical but quite brilliant, the wind-blown hands on the milestones to Thebes, the quite bizarre head gear of the Pythoness, the soldiers, and King Laius. Modern producers who delight in throwing money at movies, please note how Pasolini achieves far better results with great economy.Cultural references abound, my favourite being the Japanese music, which doesn't seem to have been referenced anywhere (there are no closing credits in the movie), but sounded very much like the Toru Takemitsu scores of Ansatsu (Assasination), Woman in the Dunes, and Harakiri.The story in a strict narrative sense has problems, Citti doesn't convince as any type of king or warrior, giving the appearance of not understanding his lines at some points, and the suicide of Jocasta makes no sense in the wake of her discussions with her son. It is a movie where feeling rather than thinking brings greater rewards.

Daniel Hayes We do ourselves no favour by fixating on how well a film uses every little detail and line in an original text. Certainly, by those standards this is a mediocre, and possibly lazy, film at best. But at the same time there is the problem of being so liberal in one's adaptation that every goes sour, the latest attempt at "Vanity Fair" is a perfect example. But this film, along with Bresson's "Pickpocket," should stand as the rules of adaptation for every young director. Both films are very interpretative, but the directors aren't so naive as to think that mere plot details can constitute a film. So what pushes this film beyond a mere surface-level adaptation? In this case, it takes a deep insight into the nature of Greek tragedy itself. Tragedy's dualism (the representational and the chaotic) is prevalent in all Pasolini's works, it was especially essential in his "Gospel," and I was excited to see how it played out in its own source, and the results are absolutely fantastic. Visually imaginative and so intellectually superior to its contemporaries it seems out of place in film.5 out of 5 - Essential