Tales of Ordinary Madness

After the lecture of a poem to a group of bored students, the alcoholic and sex addicted poet Charles Serking (Ben Gazzara) meets a young girl in the backstage and caresses her breasts. Then he travels to Los Angeles, and has kinky sex with bizarre women. When Charles meets the gorgeous self-destructive prostitute Cass (Ornella Muti) in a bar, he finds his soul mate and falls in love for her.

Marco Ferreri is one of the weirdest directors that I know, and this "Storie di Ordinaria Follia" gives a perfect theme for him to make a good movie about of two self-destructive souls. I do not know the work of the underground poet Charles Bukowski, and actually I just know a little about his biography based on the movie "Factotum" that I hated. But in "Storie di Ordinaria Follia", Ornella Muti is on the top of her awesome beauty and her performance in the role of a tormented character is impressive. Ben Gazzara has also a stunning performance in the role of Charles Serking, a man near to madness that survives drinking booze and having dirty sex. However, this movie is only recommended for very specific audiences. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Crônicas de um Amor Louco" ("Chronicles of a Crazy Love")

The movie is based on the novel of Charles Bukowski... and the film contains its spirit. "Storie di ordinaria follia" is deliberately sensual and "dirt", the main carachter (Ben Gazzara) takes directly inspiration from Bukowski himself -a drunk writer, who chooses to live among poors and neglected people, a man who lives sex like a philosophy, in order to taste the primal feeling of life...-.

The picture is worth watching -because Gazzara is very good and Ornella Muti as well, she's also so sweet and gorgeous...-. The film is interesting because it tries to capture Bukowski ideals and his pessimistic ways to see the world.

I think nevertheless that it is very difficult to film "materials" from a writer like him, because he's so excessive and outrageous... It's particularly difficult to translate his thoughts in pictures. The film is quite boring, the action is slow. Sometimes we have the feeling that there's no story. Marco Ferreri did doubtless better films (see "La grande bouffe" and "Don't touch the white woman").

Marco Ferreri is a challenging film artist. His films are powered by an

insistent, intense focus on the passions of flesh - the human response

to, need for, and meditation on our bodily bounds and desires. In his

other films he's explored the excesses which bind our mortality from

hunger to sex to suicide. Here he zeroes in on the texts of the poet

Charles Bukowski, whose poetic life of booze and sexual conquest has him

teetering on the brink of annihilation but remaining firmly in the realm

of fierce, soulful expression. The main character in Tales of Ordinary

Madness is a poet whose relationships with women range from the

infantile to the sadomasochistic while he continues to binge on a diet

of alcohol. What he doesn't expect is to fall in love. Being a poetic

film (that is based around symbols and evocative imagery rather than

plot) this is a beautiful, estranged experience. Its a fascinating

glimpse of America from the outside. Vividly powered by Ben Gazzara's

performance as the outsider poet in the shadows of society, this is a

film to be explored with a roving eye. Its a film where the sex scenes

are not choreographed and sensual but brutal and unflinching in their

approach to the passions of flesh. Its a rough film but one which takes

us into the dark corners of love.

Spectacularly sleazy, beautiful, boisterous and sexy, this is the real Bukowski deal, a booze-fueled erotic odyssey by the adventurous Ferreri with the perfectly cast Ben Gazzara as Charles Serking (Bukowski).

Ornella Muti, as Serking's sexual muse, is Venus incarnate and turns in a powerhouse performance as Cass, an emotionally damaged whore with a penchant for pain. The scenes of Gazzara swaggering in and out of LA's fleapit bars, apartments and hotel rooms convey a filthy, delirious ambiance that is vividly captured by Tonino Delli Colli's superb cinematography and Dante Ferretti's exquisitely oily production design. This is such an amazing looking film with a thick, steamy, anything-goes atmosphere of lust-ridden anarchy.

Much grittier than the accomplished "Barfly" and more watchable than "Love Is A Dog From Hell", the entire affair has an emotional, raw resonance that slavishly captures the Bukowski sensibility and remains consistently perverse in its singular vision of a man enslaved by alcoholic and sexual gluttony.

Phillipe Sarde's score is moody and rich, as is Gazzara's breathy voice-over.

A masterpiece.

Neither Bukowski nor Marco Ferreri's film will shock the audience any more. This is a grim tale, but told in an exciting way with the enigmatic Gazarra and the superb Ornella Muti in front of the camera, backed by legendary Italians, like production designer Dante Ferretti (who worked, among others, with Fellini and Pasolini, and recently bedazzled movie-goers with 'Titus') and D.O.P. Tonino Delli Colli ('The Good, the Bad and The Ugly'; 'Histoires Extraordinaires') A great film, some years ahead of its time, so now truly not to be missed.