I've not seen a lot of Pasolini and rented this one by way of "Caro Diario" in which both Pasolini and Silvana Mangano, the mother in the film, are mentioned. I actually quite liked it, though it is definitely a product of its heady time. It begins with the Marxist dream - the gift of a factory to the workers. The gifter, we find out, is the capitalist father of a middle class Milanese family and this action leads to the final mythic image of him naked, shouting in the Wasteland. The first scene also provides a number of caveats to this gift, not the least of which is "Everything the middle class does is wrong".
The linear narrative of the film is bookended by these opening and closing scenes. It involves an idyllic middle class family, consisting of mother, father, sister, brother tended by their maid in an idyllic house, being visited by a friend of the son (Stamp). This beatific stranger proves irresistible in turn to each member of the family. I would quibble with the Christ nature of the character mentioned elsewhere in that "The Way" here is definitely through the Crotch and not the Cross. The father of the family is presented as a sickly Fisher King whom the stranger heals (again though the Way of the Crotch is evident in this scene as well). Halfway though the film the stranger leaves and the next half follows the subsequent quests of the four family members and the maid, only the latter of which is to a, literally, higher plane.
There are a lot of nice touches in the film not least of which the cinematic rendering of the maid's story. Amusingly, once the maid Emilia leaves on her quest she is replaced in the household with another maid named Emilia (the interchangeability of the proletariat). I also liked the mother's picking up a male prostitute in front of an Italian tourism poster (thanks to DVD stop motion!). Also the use of the church in the same sequence. The son's thoughts on art and the artistic process are also engaging. One final thought - if the stranger can be considered Christlike (he does, after all, heal the family and foretell his own departure) it is interesting how the paths of each person touched by him diverge. Interesting in the sense that early Christianity was much like this - a variety of interpretations of Christ's life and death. Only after the four NT gospels were canonized was this variety suppressed, even actively persecuted (as with the Spanish Inquisition, which NOBODY expects!!)
The linear narrative of the film is bookended by these opening and closing scenes. It involves an idyllic middle class family, consisting of mother, father, sister, brother tended by their maid in an idyllic house, being visited by a friend of the son (Stamp). This beatific stranger proves irresistible in turn to each member of the family. I would quibble with the Christ nature of the character mentioned elsewhere in that "The Way" here is definitely through the Crotch and not the Cross. The father of the family is presented as a sickly Fisher King whom the stranger heals (again though the Way of the Crotch is evident in this scene as well). Halfway though the film the stranger leaves and the next half follows the subsequent quests of the four family members and the maid, only the latter of which is to a, literally, higher plane.
There are a lot of nice touches in the film not least of which the cinematic rendering of the maid's story. Amusingly, once the maid Emilia leaves on her quest she is replaced in the household with another maid named Emilia (the interchangeability of the proletariat). I also liked the mother's picking up a male prostitute in front of an Italian tourism poster (thanks to DVD stop motion!). Also the use of the church in the same sequence. The son's thoughts on art and the artistic process are also engaging. One final thought - if the stranger can be considered Christlike (he does, after all, heal the family and foretell his own departure) it is interesting how the paths of each person touched by him diverge. Interesting in the sense that early Christianity was much like this - a variety of interpretations of Christ's life and death. Only after the four NT gospels were canonized was this variety suppressed, even actively persecuted (as with the Spanish Inquisition, which NOBODY expects!!)