Pigsty

#9 in my ranking of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filmography.

I don’t think this quite works. I think something has broken in Pasolini’s narrative brain at this point where his hatred of modernity, Italy, culture (past, present, and what he saw as the future), the lack of Marxist revolution, and even the New Left was simply the point of his cinematic undertakings at this point. We’re left with symbols, implied meanings, and archetypes. I’m just glad he’s really good at making movies, or this would have been a complete disaster instead of something of a near miss.

The film has two parallel stories. The first is nearly wordless and takes place in some kind of Medieval setting (it seems to be Spain, but it’s mainly filmed on Mount Etna). The second is set in contemporary West Germany and centers on the son of an industrialist who is caught between conformity and rebellion, and it’s a far wordier affair.

In the medieval setting, a nameless bandit (Pierre Clementi) finds armor and a rifle which he uses to kill a soldier before gaining a follower (Franco Citti) and becoming cannibals who decapitate their victims, throw the heads into a volcanic opening, and save (or enslave?) four women held captive. They become the terror of the countryside, eliciting a response from the local officials who entrap them with a pair of naked young people, capture them, and then sentence them to death by being tied to the black volcanic ground to be eaten by dogs.

In the contemporary German setting, Julian (Jean-Pierre Leaud) explains to Ida (Anne Wiazemsky) that he has no interest in joining her and her friends to protest the Berlin Wall by pissing on it (the incoherence of Ida’s objections to the wall as a construct of Western Capitalism seems to be a joke on Pasolini’s part at the expense of the New Left because the wall was constructed by communist East Germany, making it seem like Ida, as committed to progressive politics as she makes herself out to be, doesn’t actually understand the world at all). Julian enters a catatonic state after Ida leaves, leaving his mother (Margarita Lozano) to ache over him while his father, Herr Klotz (Alberto Lionello), complete with Hitler mustache, schemes to destroy his rival, Herr Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), a former schoolmate who became a war criminal under another name during the Nazi regime. The point of this all feels like a rehash of what Pasolini managed more interestingly in Teorema, but Pigsty has the advantage of being more outrageous, allowing for more purely entertaining moments.

What do these two tales have to do with each other? Well, I think the main point is that human nature won’t change, and that really irritated Pasolini. He really expected that at some point the proletariat would rise up in unison, the New Socialist Man, to revolt against the bourgeois, and it never happened. The death of the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti seems to have been the turning point in his thinking (as evidenced in The Hawks and the Sparrows), and Pasolini was left with the death of his ideology and a world that has always been fallen and continues to fall in his own eyes. He hated modernity, the only group of people he regularly doesn’t abuse in his films are farmers (who make a late appearance here, represented by Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli) implying a utopian view of rural living that Italy was swiftly leaving behind. West Germany then becomes a symbol of that decadence and urbanity that Pasolini so abhorred.

There also becomes a more literal connection between the two when it’s discovered that one character likes to go to the titular pigsties for implied carnal experiences but ends up eaten entirely by the pigs, drawing a parallel with the eating by dogs in the medieval section.

And we get to my problem with the film: it’s a film that’s coming straight from Pasolini’s id without passing through any sort of narrative concerns. There are stylistic contrasts (the settings of Etna played against the palatial estate supposedly in West Germany, the muteness against the verboseness, and the simple change in time periods) that are obviously intentional, but ultimately the exercise seems like an effort on Pasolini’s part to simply step back from the world and accuse everyone of not living up to his Marxist standards. Characters no longer feel real, especially Julian and Ida who feel more like artefacts of a Godard film rather than the naturalistic efforts that Pasolini had put into his first films. It’s stylization in pursuit of hate objects.

However, that’s not to imply that the film is a miserable experience. I was actually reasonably entertained by it, but it was the surface of things that got me through it. Firstly, Pasolini is simply a great visual filmmaker, and his films are always gorgeous to look at. Pigsty is no exception to that rule. The footage filmed at Etna, in particular, is simply great to regard. While I don’t think that Leaud or Wiazemsky give anything like naturalistic performances, their mannered approaches to their characters provide some fun banter, but the most entertaining (and mannered) performances belong to Lionello and Tognazzi who get a couple of extended bits to play off of each other, nice on the surface but trying to destroy each other just beneath.

So, I see Pigsty as a mixed bag. Pasolini seems to have abandoned efforts at actual storytelling in pursuit of stylistic experimentation. That creates symbolism that is never as interesting as artists seem to think it is while denying the audience the traditional things to latch onto. However, there are entertaining bits, and it’s not like Pasolini isn’t saying nothing with the effort. There was real thought that went into the film’s construction, but Pasolini’s hatred was the motivating factor of the film, not telling a story.

Rating: 2.5/4